Traction : mobility, religion and patriarchy in Shanghai

Abstract

Since the 1980s sizeable communities of 'overseas Chinese' (ethnic Chinese with citizenship rights in countries other than China) have formed in China's major cities. This influx is typically taken as evidence of an enduring relationship between the overseas Chinese and China. However, this perception obscures the ways the overseas Chinese are re-imagining their relationship with China and its people. It also belies the fact that very little is known about how the overseas Chinese structure their lives in reform-era China. This thesis is a study of cosmopolitanism as a way of life in the Circle of Joy, a Christian sisterhood for overseas Chinese women in Shanghai, one of China's biggest and most cosmopolitan cities. Most of these women are upper middle class housewives who entered China accompanying spouses drawn to the country for economic reasons. Everyday life in the sisterhood is orientated by a cosmopolitan logic that draws from deep understandings of what it means to be a woman, diverse notions of Chineseness and the experiences of having lived in multiple places. Focussing on the practices of faith in the Circle of Joy, I explore the ways a distinctive Chinese cosmopolitanism is lived out in the lives of highly mobile women. In particular, I show how the women operationalise cosmopolitan logics through their faith, using Christianity to interpret and cope with dilemmas posed by lives of perpetual movement, cultivating an ethical frame and displaying virtue. Building on Anna Tsing's notion of 'friction', I use the term traction to describe the women's everyday attempts to wrestle with the forces of mobility. They use their religion to gain a communal hold on the ground of Shanghai and fight the disintegrating forces in their lives. The power exerted through this traction defends the rights and privileges of the women as wives as it entrenches particular understandings of what it means to be a woman in a mobile patriarchal order. In examining the ways a cosmopolitan logic is lived out in an overseas Chinese community, this thesis departs from assumptions of an inescapable diasporic yearning for China as homeland and details an alternative imagining of the relationship between the overseas Chinese and the country. In putting forth the realities of life in reform era China for the overseas Chinese, I stress the struggles and contestations over class, race and international politics that underlie idealisations of cosmopolitanism rather than seeing cosmopolitanism as a means of enacting a universal global ideal. When lived, the logic of cosmopolitanism is always a matter of practical connections. By examining these connections, I speak to anthropological debates over concepts like cosmopolitanism, globalisation and diaspora.