Urban Imagination And Identity Struggling In The New Generation Of Migrant Workers’ Consumer Culture

Migrant workers are a unique in transitional China. Currently, the80s and90s "new generation migrant workers" are becoming the main force of this group. Unlike their predecessors, new generation migrant workers have strong senses of belonging and yearning towards cities and urban cultures. Consuming has become an important dimension for migrant workers to get urban involvement and integration. It is important to study the consuming behaviors and cultures of new generation migrant workers.From the perspective of communicative sociology and cultural sociology, the dissertation studies migrant workers in the Yangtze River Delta region. Based on the theories of "consumer culture" and "community imagination", the discussion focuses on the dynamic of migrant workers’consuming behaviors and cultural identity. The core question is the consumptive expression and mobilized construction of their identities. The author manages to create a multi-level and multi-variable system with migrant workers’personal qualities, local memory, urban experience, the social status quo, the environment of public opinions, and the media ecology.The study finds that under modern social context of the Yangtze River Delta, the urban space synthetic image of the city and the mass media and consumer culture penetrate into the daily lives of the new generation of migrant workers groups, imperceptibly changing their consumer attitudes, consumer behaviors and consumption patterns:their consumer behaviors shifting from conservative to open, the consumption structure from simple to complex, consumer attitudes turned to the avant-garde, and consumption patterns from traditional to modern. Consumption develops beyond the sectors of the economy, and becomes an act of social and cultural patterns that inherently affect the migrant workers on the city, with their avant-garde imagination of becoming "new citizen".At the same time, as to the consumer behaviors of the new generation of migrant workers in the Yangtze River Delta region, not only are they presented to fight against the vulnerable "migrant workers" stereotype created by the mass media, but also do they, through the symbolic possession of consuming cultures, struggle with the reality of the situational inequality of group identity and social status. The consumption "culturally" shapes the "new citizen" community imagination of the new generation of migrant workers, and more importantly fight against the mass media stereotypes and unequal status as a "capital" representing the new generation. Further, the consumption promotes in the micro level the urban integration and cultural adaptation of the new generation in daily life.