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

Shanghai is often regarded as China’s best embodiment of cosmopolitanism,\n\ntranscending the local through the purchase of global goods that, in turn,\n\nallows its citizens to be part of a post-socialist world. This aspiring outlook of\n\nShanghai is often the result of larger institutional changes, such as the move to\n\na market economy and China’s entry into WTO. Crucial to the understanding\n\nof how this state-mediated cosmopolitan culture came to have an impact on\n\nthe lives of individuals, the key patterns in romantic experiences of young\n\nShanghainese women are discussed in elaborate detail in this thesis. In\n\nparticular, this study focuses on two specific forces, namely the state and the\n\nmarket, that have greatly shaped the romantic context of cosmopolitan\n\nShanghai. As such, this thesis seeks to answer three key questions: 1) Is it\n\npossible that the Chinese state has (re)structured contemporary Shanghainese\n\nwomen’s romantic experiences and, if so, in what ways? 2) Do current\n\nfindings on the role of the consumer market in shaping romantic practices also\n\napply within the context under study? 3) In what ways have Shanghainese\n\nwomen played out their love lives in the current context?\n\nBuilding a theoretical framework from state-role theory which emphasizes the\n\nrole of the Chinese state in initiating life-altering social transformations and\n\ntheory that relates romantic love to the consumer culture and the social\n\norganization of advanced capitalism, this thesis asserts that the romantic\n\nexperiences of young Shanghainese women both mirror and extend the\n\nfundamental arguments framing both theories, thus offering new levels of\n\ncomplexity for examining the relationship between romantic love and culture.\n\nThrough an open-ended interview process following grounded theory\n\nprinciples, 44 respondents (age 25-39) are asked questions regarding their\n\nromantic experiences to provide key details from the context under study. The\n\nfindings of this study suggest that the state and the state-mediated consumer\n\nculture has produced contradictions in the romantic experiences of young\n\nShanghainese women. While as cosmopolitan individuals young women are\n\nsupposed to be desirous and constraint-free in pursuit of their romantic ideals,\n\npersistent class and gender hierarchies, and rising economic and emotional\n\nuncertainties, nevertheless, undercut their freedom and many of the incentives\n\nto realize these ideals. Such freedom is further undercut by mounting pressure\n\nfrom their parents who are primarily dependent on their only daughters, as a\n\nresult of the family-planning policy and other shifting state policies in the past,\n\nfor long-term financial and emotional care amidst rising costs and barely\n\nfunctional social welfare programs. Caught in a tension between self desires\n\nand traditional role obligations, young women become rational actors in their\n\nromantic experiences as they negotiate or even transform the conventionalities\n\nby lurching between different understandings of love and varying moralities of\n\nself and family to justify their motives and behaviors. As such, their romantic\n\nexperiences embody the market ethos of consumer capitalism—rational, selfinterested,\n\nstrategic, and profit-maximizing––complexly entangled in a\n\nmaterial and moral environment built by the socialist state.