‘White’ Undesirables: Socio-cultural Hierarchies and Racial Anxiety in Early-twentieth-century Shanghai

Abstract

ABSTRACT Social status in early-twentieth-century Shanghai hinged on varied markers. Wealth, race, and public conduct each affected social and cultural mobility in complex ways. This paper considers how these themes helped entrench social hierarchies by focusing on non-elite foreigners who occupied racially and socially ambiguous positions in Shanghai. Using the media representation of a murder as a point of access, this paper explores who these non-elites were and what they meant to the society they lived in, arguing that liminality such as theirs induced deep-seated elite anxiety over the stability of Western privilege and white prestige in colonial and semi-colonial environments.