Building the New World 2

People, Identity and Language


The vast amount of new housing of course signals the arrival of new people. At the end of 2006, Sohu News reported that number of legal temporary migrant residents in the greater Changhzou area was 1.43 million, next to a ‘local’ population of about 4.13 million. The exact numbers are extremely difficult to calculate due to the mobility of the migrant population and the migrant figure also does not appear to include professional migrants who have been granted a local Chanzhou ID card and permanent residency. A man once said to me that in the Hutang area of the Wujin district near where I live, migrants outnumber locals two to one. A Baidu discussion forum poster makes the following comment:
“It feels as if there are outsiders everywhere. There must be 2 million, they’re like ants. What do reckon they are all doing? Can they build a more perfect city??? –my God” “我觉得常州到处多是外地人,我觉得有200万,和蚂蚁一样,你说来这么多外地人干什么?他们能把常州建设的更美好>>>>???My god~”
As this comment indicates, the same tensions flourish in Changzhou that exist in wealthy regions everywhere where a large population of migrants does the jobs that local people are mostly unwilling to do. In Changzhou’s case, this is perhaps compounded by the inferiority complex, which some argue the city suffers from. One Jiangsu blogger writes: “Because it can’t get out of the shadow of Suzhou and Wuxi, the city really looks down on people from the north of Jiangsu.” “因为走不出苏州无锡的阴影，所以特别看不起江北人。”


However, it is not only people from farming families in poorer inland provinces and the north of Jiangsu who come to Changzhou. The city’s extraordinary economic boom has also attracted professional middle-class migrants from every corner of the country. Certainly about half of the Chinese people I know here come from outside the city (not including my students, almost all of whom come from outside). And in addition to tension, this it creates the possibilities for multiple confusions with regards to identity.


A student once told my colleague that Changzhou locals look down upon students from outside. As evidence she said that people in shops are rude to her. I heard similar complaints in Sichuan and I have few doubts that in most places of the world people’s first encounters with a strange place are marked by an impression that it is not as friendly as the place where they grew up. But in Changzhou the situation of my colleague’s student is complicated somewhat, because if more one quarter of the city’s population is a temporary migrant worker, and many of them do service work, then a very significant proportion of the people working in shops must also come from the outside. Perhaps the student and the shop-assistants both mistake each other for locals, and believing that locals are prejudiced against outsiders acted on the assumption that the other looks down upon them. Or perhaps the shop assistants would very much like to be locals, and act accordingly. [this idea has been stongly disputed by a reader, but I maintain that it is possible, even if it might not happen often --JL]

When I describe the differences between living in Changzhou and living in Sichuan, I often say that due to the migrant population, Changzhou people are much better at speaking Mandarin, and much more willing to speak it. On more than a few occasions this has drawn the comment that the local Changzhou language is endangered. Two of my colleagues have told me that their children are unwilling to speak the Changzhou language: “they say it sounds too provincial.” Talking about this, some people sound concerned, others resigned and others unsure of what attitude to take. My students here are different from those in Sichuan in that here I mostly hear them using Mandarin to communicate with each other. In Sichuan, the college I worked at ran poster campaigns in vain attempts to achieve such a situation. Granted, in Sichuan there was a strong sense of a Sichuan provincial dialect that does not exist in Jiangsu. I have never heard anybody speak of Jiangsu language; people usually define speech according to city. However, as far as actual linguistic variation goes, the descriptions of people in Sichuan and Jiangsu indicate that both provinces are similar in that speech varies from locale to locale according to distance. The students in Suining, though, would just leap across such linguistic variations and speak what they assumed to be a general Sichuan language. In a class in Changzhou, I once asked a girl from Suzhou and a boy from Changzhou if they could understand each other’s dialects. The whole class was curious. It seemed none of them knew; none of them had ever tried to use their city’s language with someone from Changzhou. The boy in question shrunk back from their curiosity. “You won’t understand,” he said in Mandarin. The others urged him to try. “She won’t…” Then he uttered a quick, short sentence. “See, you didn’t understand, right?” The others looked at her. She nodded, “I can understand most things” she said. But it was clear that, at least for my Changzhou student, Changzhou language wasn’t something that could be used to communicate with outsiders. He seemed not to want it even to be possible. Perhaps for him, living in a part of his local city that was dominated by outsiders, his language was a thing that he wanted to keep for himself and not share with the outsiders. Or it could have been that he was like the children of my colleagues: he desired a national identity, and resented being made to speak his ‘provincial’ sounding language, a tongue that tied him to Changzhou, a city without any of the nationally famous sights possessed by the hometowns of some of his classmates.
I am not sure to what extent that student is typical of other Changzhou people. I have never had a problem communicating with people in Mandarin in Changzhou, and never had the same sense that they would rather speak their own dialect that I had often in Sichuan. Once when I was talking about Sichuan with a friend in Changzhou, I said that I thought Sichuan people were often proud of their identity and language. He seemed a bit confused. I said that, for example, even in children’s classes, students would speak to me in Sichuan dialects. “Maybe they can’t speak Mandarin? Perhaps if they’ve been raised by their grandparents, they don’t really know how to speak Mandarin.”
“Yeah that’s possible. But I do also think they weren’t even trying. They wanted to speak the Sichuan dialect, it seemed to me like they were proud of it.”
“I don’t know… In places like Shanghai and Beijing people, where the economy is more developed and people look down on outsiders, the people are proud of their language. But not in places like Sichuan, or here…” He found the idea strange that a place poorer than Changzhou could be proud of its language.