Analysis On Identity Of Agricultural To Non-agricultural Residents

Since 1990's China has turned the agricultural Hukou into non-agricultural Hukou for resettlement of the peasants who lost their land during the process of urbanization. The new residents, as a general category, including at least three generations and this thesis focus on the middle-aged. For their village experience and tradition memory, they fetch much difficulty to overcome the anxiety of identity and reconstruct identity.This thesis aims at describing their self-identity and its impacting factors from the perspective of identity theory. Through participant observation and deep interviews within a concentrated residential area in Shanghai suburbs, I find that the new residents still have high expectations of citizenship which impels them to pursue "non-agricultural employment and the treatments of citizen", however; the reality locates them as "intermediate group".After "rural-urban" space conversion, their interaction with the city and reconstruction of space order show their dualistic social properties which cause the lingering sense of identity. They eventually build their boundary between groups, and locate themselves as the second category inside the city. Through the conscious comparison with the other two categories, in the view of "occupation, the treatment of security, interaction with the citizens and the border" , they foster psychological dynamic equilibrium.