Rediscovering Urban Subcultures: The Contrast Between Shanghai and Beijing

One of the common problems in Western studies of contemporary China is to treat Chinese society as a monolithic entity. Scholars tend to emphasize certain distinctive national characteristics of the Chinese people as a whole and do not pay much attention to variations and transformations of Chinese identity. Recent scholarly interest in the meaning of 'Chineseness' and the relationship between Confucian culture and neo-authoritarianism reinforces a