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Although the formation of overseas Chinese communities in cities constitutes a major trend in reform era China, conceptualisations of the relationship between the overseas Chinese and China remain divided. The overseas Chinese are seen either as temporary migrants with little attachment to the country or as inescapably connected to China through native place. This paper aims to move beyond this dichotomous understanding by examining the processes of place-making among overseas Chinese Christians in Shanghai, one of China’s major urban centres. It draws on ethnographic research conducted within a Christian network and illustrates how these Christians negotiated the forces of global capitalism, state regulations, and an indigenous Christian trajectory to construct a religious territory and centre Shanghai as home. By showing how they understand their place as Christians, this paper argues that economic restructuring in the reform period enabled the emergence of cities as new centres where the overseas Chinese are making a place for themselves. It contributes to the literature on the overseas Chinese and China by redirecting attention from the native place as the locus of overseas Chinese attachment to the city as a new centre of belonging.  [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents a paper that focuses on intermarriage in China and its changing image. It presents an analysis of the intermarriages, specifically in Shanghai, on the grounds of social exchange that they affect. Moreover, it explores their outcomes for immigrant internalization for the couples. According to the author, long-term relationships between men from the West and women from China were greatly influenced by considerations of emigration during the 1980s and 1990s. The study reports that most couples involved in this kind of intermarriage eventually become business partners.

This article examines the emerging service industry in Shanghai through the prism of young male migrant hairdressers and their even younger assistants. These “cosmopolitan” service workers are framed within Lisa Rofel's concept of “desiring China” in order to show how the service industry in Shanghai is a kind of “Goffmanian world”, in that the hairdresser must present and “sell” himself in particular ways on the “front-stage” of the market-driven service industry. By examining both the “impression management” and “emotional labour” of the hairdresser, I argue that not only are we able to observe China's opening up policy as it is embodied in the service worker, but we are also able to observe on the salon floor hierarchical and power labour relations at work and the emergence of a commodity-style subject. These young male migrant service workers are framed as a kind of complement, or extension, of the young female migrant industrial workers studied by Pun Ngai in her book Made in China. By comparing and contrasting the “Chinese working daughters” of the factory regime with the “Chinese working sons” of the service regime we are able to observe Shanghai's structural shift from an industrial production centre to a service-based world city. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]