The Acculturation Of New Subei People In Shanghai

The fast paces of globalization and urbanization have brought waves of migrants moving into and out of the city of Shanghai. Studies about migrants and immigrants take up a major role in the field of intercultural communication, as these people often carry various cultural"baggage", with which they find it hard to get integrated into the new environment. Issues concerning their acculturation into the host society have attracted many scholars'attention.This study seeks to examine the acculturation level of the new Subei people who share the same origin of"Subei"with the Subei people, a socially distinguishable group which was formed and lived in Shanghai from the 1840s till the late 20th century. Subei people's adaptation to Shanghai proved generally to be a failure as they were marginalized as a stigmatized group and left behind the negative concept of"Subei ren"until today. It was hypothesized that this might become an obstacle for the new Subei people in their adaptation to the current Shanghai society.As a stigmatized sub-cultural group, the Subei migrants are considered to constitute an ethnic group in the study. This study is thus devoted itself to investigate these migrants'status of adaptation and identification with their origin, as well as to seeing whether theories and methodologies adopted mostly at the country level can be applied in a sub-cultural way.Phinney's ethnic group theory and Berry's framework of acculturation serve as the theoretical base for developing the study. And the research methods include both quantitative questionnaire and qualitative interviews.A revised version of the Multigroup Ethnic Identity Measure (MEIM) and a questionnaire based on Berry's framework developed to test acculturation level of young knowledge migrants in Shanghai (AL-YKM-SH) were combined as a scale to send to the target group and a sample of 116 was collected. Data analyses were later conducted and findings from both the statistics and interviews were discussed to address the two research questions. Concerning ethnic identity, the new Subei people's identification with the origin was relatively low and the salience of this identity was weak. Answers from the interviewees in the confirmatory study were in accordance with this finding.The second research question concerning relationships among demographic factors, ethnic identity and acculturation level, ethnic identity, as a subjective factor for acculturation, proved to have less influence on the migrants'adaptation, compared with some demographic factors like socioeconomic status, social support, and so on. Both questionnaire and confirmatory interview analysis were conducted to seek understandings about the status of these migrants in current Shanghai.