Constructing the other: Restructuring regional discrimination in Shanghairen’s digital territories

As the continuous influx of migrants highly stratifies Shanghai’s demographic structure, regional discrimination within the metropolis has undergone a profound transformation. Drawing on Loïc Wacquant’s triadic dialectic of space, this study investigates how the perceived erosion of the historically dominant position once held by segments of Shanghairen community in both social and physical space has triggered defensive exclusionary practices in symbolic space. This inverts Wacquant’s canonical model, in which territorial stigma is imposed on marginalized populations from without; here, a formerly dominant group actively deploys stigmatization as a compensatory strategy. Significantly, the target of discrimination has expanded from traditional rural laborers to encompass some new groups of non-locals. Facing real-world marginalization, segments of the Shanghairen community have retreated to emerging social media platforms, such as Xiaohongshu and Bilibili, reappropriating them as exclusionary digital territories. Through Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), the findings reveal that Shanghairen erect an invisible digital boundary-making by leveraging Internet Protocol (IP) geolocation visibility and written Shanghainese dialect expressions to perform and consolidate cultural capital boundaries. Furthermore, to navigate? strict algorithmic moderation?, they engage in cod?ed cyber-slang, mutating traditional derogatory terms into highly coded, metaphorical cyber-slang.