A brief summary on the Shanghainese identity

This post is going to focus more on the historical aspect of the Shanghainese identity. I'm aware most of you are probably more here for the political aspect of Shanghai's lockdown. Warning: This might disinterest you and its a bit long. I am writing this because I am still thinking about the previous post about Shanghainese and not supporting Hongkong. I will draw on historical events central to the creation of the Shanghainese identity and at the end refer back to that statement.
During the Qing dynasty, the region of Kiangnan had a untouchable caste called the dú-ming 墮民. We are not 100% sure how they formed, but people rumour they were the descendants of Mongolian invaders. Towards the end of the Qing (by the time the Western Concessions in Shanghai and Ningpo in 1840s) they were essentially assimilated into the local population.

A very significant event that occurred in the 1853 was the Nanjing Massacre, where by the Taipings slaughtered the entire city of anyone unwilling to denounce the Qing and convert to Christianity. Later when the Qing retook the city in 1864 they slaughtered all the Taiping and anyone who had converted to Christianity. Nevertheless after the fall of Nanjing, the Taipings reached the rest of Kiangnan. This war lead to many cities and towns in Kiangnan being massacred and destroyed, with people able to walk across rivers because they were so clogged with dead bodies. This began a migration of refugees of the region's people towards the only safe treaty ports and the capital of Hangzhou (which was also slaughtered later, although to a lesser extent than Nanjing).

When the British established the first concession in Shanghai, there were native people already present. We call them Native Shanghainese, and to this day they speak a variant of Shanghainese slightly different to the Shanghainese you may know about. For instance they would use the pronoun 我伲, whilst we use 阿拉 (which is taken from the migrants from around Zhejiang, like Ningpo, after she fell too). Over time, the term Native Shanghainese has been expanded to not only include the original inhabitants of the town of Shanghai, but also those descended from neighbouring villages next to Shanghai (you may have heard of Pudong people referred to as Natives). The Native Shanghainese identity has always been a sense of pride and most people alive, including myself can identify as Shanghainese but not as Native Shanghainese. My main ancestry is as a 越人from 斗門紹興 teu-mung village, Shaoxing. Ive never been there, but six generations ago during the 1850s, my family moved to Shanghai to escape the Taiping war. I have partial ancestry from many other parts of Kiangnan, ie. Mainly Ningpo and a tiny bit of Suzhou and Native Shanghainese.... but because I do not speak their way, I am not Native Shanghainese. Its rude to identify as one of them and hijack their culture when the connection is so weak. And its actually quite silly to identify as one of them when we speak differently.
There is a term called 江北 Kiangpo, a region north of Kiangnan. The border is not entirely clear, some arguments are made on the geography of the river as a separator and others on the cultural and language differences, etc. The main point is, by the time the Taiping wars occur and devastate Nanjing and Yangzhou, and other Kiangpo regions, the people of Kiangnan turned away from respecting their culture to ostracising them. Their refugees and migrants into Shanghai end up becoming discriminated against. Over the next century, they would form the new untouchable caste in Shanghai. They refused to employ them, arrested them and evicted them from their housing, and treated them very poorly. We essentially refused to build the Shanghainese identity with them. And hence formed two groups, the Shanghainese and the Komponese. The third biggest migrant group into Shanghai was the Cantonese, and even they were easily assimilated into the Shanghainese identity. In essence, the Komponese became the new dú-ming.

Unfortunately, I cannot undo this and I am not proud of what my ancestors did. And even though some Komponese were also in Shanghai for six generations too, and they would have also been purged by the Communists after 1950, they were still treated as an untouchable class. This is something that many Shanghainese of my generation feel very guilty over (maybe our grandparents generation don't care - but they are dead). In the 1980s, due to massive migrations into Shanghai from the rest of China, people started using the term Old Shanghainese (or just plainly Shanghainese) to refer to Shanghainese and Komponese together, because some Komponese have been in Shanghai longer than others who identify as Shanghainese (from Kiangnan).

However, this is the reason why modern Shanghai (post 1980s) has tried to be as welcoming as possible to Chinese migrants into Shanghai. Every time a policy is proposed to protect Shanghainese culture, it is always watered down or completely rejected, insofar as to avoid any similar repeat of discrimination against New Shanghainese. And we do have this guilt, it is something very forefront of our minds.

To give you a rough perspective of how many migrants came into Shanghai in post 1980. There was about 4-5 million people in Shanghai region in the 1950s, and about 7 million in 1980s. However, at one point the government had to publish there were 11 million people in 1980 (to possibly fudge the numbers). Now there are 25 million people in Shanghai, and keep in mind, 1980s was the one child policy, where Shanghai had possibly the lowest birthrate per woman in China (rumoured to be at 0.6 per woman).

More or less, there is a collective memory behind the Shanghainese identity. It involves the devastating war of the Taipings and having to flee/migrate to the Western Concessions in Shanghai. Later in the 1950s, that memory is re-invoked when the Communists march towards Shanghai and many Shanghainese fled to Hongkong. Although historically, Shanghai, Hongkong, Ningpo, Weihaiwei, and other Western holdings in China all supported each other during anti-Imperialist protests... it was the 1950s escape to Hongkong that truly cemented our perspective. This is why Shanghainese always saw Hongkong as a sister city, because we saw a part of ourself in her. And this is why we supported her. I'll be honest with you, most Shanghainese are probably indifferent to Tibet or Xinjiang, just like to many other parts of the world. But Hongkong is not one of them. There may be some elderly Shanghainese who only follow State media, or young Shanghainese who cannot speak Shanghainese who also are very Nationalistic, but the core belief in the Shanghainese identity is actually pro-Hongkong. I don't want to act unfairly towards New Shanghainese, but I think my final statement will appear to be so.

I think it is a little disingenuous to high-jack our identity and then speak on our behalf about something that is so core to our identity.