get off my bund

Shanghai Particularism: Anti-foreigner image uploaded from a Shanghainese bulletin board, the “foreigners” concerned being wai di ren, ie Chinese people not from Shanghai. It’s partly prejudice against migrant labour, also building on traditional regional rivalries and suchlike folk anthropology.

Beijingers are supposed to be scheming and political. Men from the Northeast are supposed to be violent drunks. Anhui people are sharp traders – Essex boys. There’s a kind of Yorkshire thing going with Shandong: “strong I’th’arm, thick I’th’ ‘ead.”. Shanghainese are supposed to be streetwise intellectuals. Here they are boycotting a radio station because it hurt their feelings.

Yes, Shanghai is twinned with Liverpool.

Comments

[JamesP]

Off the top of my head, Sichuanese girls are 'spicy', Henanese are beggars and cheats (there was even a book called 'What's Wrong With Henan?' written by one), Heilongjiang girls are slutty, and Cantonese are tricky and mercantile.

[ejh]

It's not unlike that in Huesca, to tell the truth: it's not so much a variant on "wogs start at Todmorden" as the fact that many of the locals think like that without realising it, i.e. it's not prejudice so much as environment. Spaniards from elsewhere in Spain talk about how difficult it is: "cerrado" ("closed") is a term often used.

It's the consequence of being a rural area in which personal geographical mobility has been historically rare: even to move from the villages to the town itself is relatively new. (One sign of this is that many, many locals have, as surnames, the names of local villages, e.g. Sipán or Ayerbe or Casbas.)

So they've grown up in an environment in which nearly everybody is "from round here": they find it hard enough to get their heads around the concept of people living here but coming from elsewhere in Spain, and the idea of an actual foreigner doing it is completely new. They understand that there as such people as tourists, yes: but that somebody from elsewhere might be as much a citizen as they....no, they don't see it. And this causes problems, which they do not realise or understand.

Would this apply at all to an enormous city like Shanghai, with its history of comings and goings? I don't know - but presuming there were (and maybe are?) restrictions on travel and on moving from one part of the country to another without permission, perhaps there is the same basic unfamiliarity with gradations of "belonging", with any other scheme than locals and outsiders?

[jamie]

Well there's the hukou system, which is still going in modified form and which identifies people as peasants or city dwellers on their id cards and as such is almost a badge of second class citizenship. What's ironic about Shanghai is that its history means that cosmopolitanism becomes a parochial mark of identity, and tends to increase prejudice against hicks from the sticks.

[ejh]

Heh. Maybe also see "Barcelona" which I may have slagged off on this site before.