Between the worlds: Shanghai's young middle-class migrants imagining their city

- Shanghai's young middle class share global-class imaginaries but feel ambivalent about belonging to their global city.
- They experience Shanghai as an “in-between” space of aspiration, expectation and disappointment.
- Aspirational lifestyles in China remain closely connected to a dense urban sensorium.
- The emergence of suburbia therefore changes local expectations of quality of life in the global city.
- “Western” concepts of suburbia translate differently into the context of China's developmental urbanism.

In this paper, I use the case study of Hui, a young woman who lives in suburban Shanghai, to explore the migration experience of educated Chinese youth, who come to live, study or work in this city. A young middle class enjoys privileged access to China's global urban modernity. They are also increasingly sharing space with the “global classes” of transnational privilege. However, the image of common urban space, in which the aesthetic distinction between global-elite lifestyles and local aspiration is increasingly blurred, does not necessarily translate into common access to this space and to its hierarchies of hospitality and opportunity. Middle-class migrants are aware of their status as outsiders, whose successful integration in the city hinges not only on strategies of emplacement but also on performing the exclusive cosmopolitan repertoire that Shanghai has built for itself. Despite promises of safe bourgeois arrival, they often remain “in-between”, with a sense of vulnerability in a competitive urban environment, and struggle with divided emotional and social attachments. In this paper I look at emerging suburban lifestyles in Shanghai, which are becoming part of the Chinese urban repertoire. Many young professionals are being squeezed out of the housing market in central locations. While some may choose to continue living with their parents to save money for home ownership, others buy apartments further out. Though replicating many of the bourgeois dreams that have informed “Western” suburbia, the urban form that is developing in China is also different and its middle-class imaginaries are less readily connected to the sensorial promises of the Chinese global city.