‘New Shanghailanders’ or ‘New Shanghainese’: Western Expatriates' Narratives of Emplacement in Shanghai

As in the early twentieth century, Shanghai has again become a site for Western settlement. This paper focuses on case studies of long-term Western settlers—those in the city more than five years—and how they situate themselves in the city through their ‘narratives of emplacement’ or stories of a personalised relationship to the city. Settler stories reference both a postcolonial nostalgia for the lifestyles of the 1930s Shanghailanders, and a newer post-socialist model of cosmopolitan citizenship for mobile urban elites, related to the state-sponsored ideal of the ‘New Shanghainese.’ Taken as a whole, expatriate narratives of emplacement construct an idealised image of a culturally cosmopolitan, locally integrated and economically successful immigrant entrepreneur. Few settlers may actually live up to this ideal, but these narrative strategies allow settlers to construct imagined links to a place and polity that substitute for more substantive forms of urban citizenship, while excluding other categories of migrants.