Shanghai is often regarded as China’s best embodiment of cosmopolitanism,
transcending the local through the purchase of global goods that, in turn,
allows its citizens to be part of a post-socialist world. This aspiring outlook of
Shanghai is often the result of larger institutional changes, such as the move to
a market economy and China’s entry into WTO. Crucial to the understanding
of how this state-mediated cosmopolitan culture came to have an impact on
the lives of individuals, the key patterns in romantic experiences of young
Shanghainese women are discussed in elaborate detail in this thesis. In
particular, this study focuses on two specific forces, namely the state and the
market, that have greatly shaped the romantic context of cosmopolitan
Shanghai. As such, this thesis seeks to answer three key questions: 1) Is it
possible that the Chinese state has (re)structured contemporary Shanghainese
women’s romantic experiences and, if so, in what ways? 2) Do current
findings on the role of the consumer market in shaping romantic practices also
apply within the context under study? 3) In what ways have Shanghainese
women played out their love lives in the current context?
Building a theoretical framework from state-role theory which emphasizes the
role of the Chinese state in initiating life-altering social transformations and
theory that relates romantic love to the consumer culture and the social
organization of advanced capitalism, this thesis asserts that the romantic
experiences of young Shanghainese women both mirror and extend the
fundamental arguments framing both theories, thus offering new levels of
complexity for examining the relationship between romantic love and culture.
Through an open-ended interview process following grounded theory
principles, 44 respondents (age 25-39) are asked questions regarding their
romantic experiences to provide key details from the context under study. The
findings of this study suggest that the state and the state-mediated consumer
culture has produced contradictions in the romantic experiences of young
Shanghainese women. While as cosmopolitan individuals young women are
supposed to be desirous and constraint-free in pursuit of their romantic ideals,
persistent class and gender hierarchies, and rising economic and emotional
uncertainties, nevertheless, undercut their freedom and many of the incentives
to realize these ideals. Such freedom is further undercut by mounting pressure
from their parents who are primarily dependent on their only daughters, as a
result of the family-planning policy and other shifting state policies in the past,
for long-term financial and emotional care amidst rising costs and barely
functional social welfare programs. Caught in a tension between self desires
and traditional role obligations, young women become rational actors in their
romantic experiences as they negotiate or even transform the conventionalities
by lurching between different understandings of love and varying moralities of
self and family to justify their motives and behaviors. As such, their romantic
experiences embody the market ethos of consumer capitalism—rational, selfinterested,
strategic, and profit-maximizing––complexly entangled in a
material and moral environment built by the socialist state. / published_or_final_version / Sociology / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:HKU/oai:hub.hku.hk:10722/182278 |
| Date | January 2012 |
| Creators | Sun, Jue, 孙珏 |
| Publisher | The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) |
| Source Sets | Hong Kong University Theses |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | PG_Thesis |
| Source | http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B4784937X |
| Rights | The author retains all proprietary rights, (such as patent rights) and the right to use in future works., Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License |
| Relation | HKU Theses Online (HKUTO) |
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