Migrants in Shanghai: An Analysis of Verbal Pejoration in Weibo

This thesis examines 硬盘Yingpan ‘hard drive,’ a newly created online derogatory code word referring to the migrants in Shanghai against the historical background of discrimination of migrants in Shanghai. Based on corpus data from Chinese social media, I examine the usage patterns of this derogatory word. The results show four salient speech acts in which this word is used. These are 1) complaints about migrants, 2) abusive commands, 3) self-victimization of the locals, and 4) lamentation over the loss of Shanghai identity. These usage patterns reflect the impacts of societal changes as a result of mass migration in contemporary China. This study has implications for research of migration and the consequential societal tensions in societies across the globe