Falling in and out of the cosmopolitan romance: state, market, and the making of Shanghainese women'sromantic love experiences

Abstract

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.