The Allure of Being Modern: Personal Quality as Status Symbol Among Migrant Families in Shanghai

Abstract

This paper examines how the powerful suzhi (personal quality) discourse affects the subjective understanding of Chinese migrant workers toward their situation in the city in order to elucidate the microlevel processes that the lower social class acculturate to the dominant cultural capital. Many migrants from the Chinese countryside have remained in Shanghai despite that in doing so, their children are prohibited from taking senior high school and college entrance examinations. In two waves of interviews with migrant parents and children over a 10-year period, parents have justified their decision to remain in the city, reasoning that their children adopt “modern” habits, behaviors and lifestyles, which render them “modernized,” and thus elevate their social status even without a higher education. Cultural discourses with strong connotations of authority and power provide the framework that the migrants use to improve their relative social status at the microlevel. This research foregrounds the consideration of relative social status in decision making and social behavior as a microprocess through which the lower social class subscribes to a cultural discourse that reduces them to a lower position.