His survey also found that the "quality" of the people of Shanghai, meaning the median level of their education, etiquette and professional lives, is surprisingly low.

Wu Jianming, honorary president of the Bureau of International Expositions, said at the Shanghai World Expo China Forum late last year that Expo 2010 would help improve the situation.

"We can see the positive effect the Beijing Olympics had on the quality of its residents and this is something that fills me with great pride," he said. "Shanghai Expo is much longer than the Olympics so the effect here should be the same if not better."

Not according to sociologist Gu Jun, however.

"Shanghai residents have their own characteristics and lifestyle, and these are things that have been shaped over a long period of time. They are not the same as the people of Beijing, who were willing to change everything for the (Olympic) Games," he said.

All of which is bad news for the city's immigrants, who spend their days navigating through the subcutaneous tension that can be felt in Shanghai in the form of its us-and-them mentality.

Becoming locals

Often ignorant of the local dialect, their main hope of gaining acceptance is attaining a highly prized Shanghai hukou, or registration card. This grants them greater civil liberties, more legal entitlements and - some would say, most importantly - the respect of the Shanghainese.

Stand-up comedian Zhou Libo said the people of his hometown deserve to feel proud for all that the city has contributed to the motherland over the last century, financial and otherwise. He said the negative press about the Shanghainese mostly boils down to jealousy.

"One statistic can prove this: all those areas that criticize Shanghai only ever accounted for a fraction of its gross domestic product," he was quoted as saying by the Guangzhou-based Nanfan Zhoumo (South China Weekend), a weekly paper.

Shanghai contributed about one-sixth of China's state revenue during half a century after the establishment of modern China in 1949.

While that may well be true, other cities and provinces have their fair share of things to boast about, said Liu Guangxuan from Shandong province

"Shanghai doesn't have as many high-level officials as Beijing and its people are not as rich as their counterparts in Guangdong or the entrepreneurs in Zhejiang province," he said. "So why should we envy them? That's ridiculous."

Sociologist Gu believes that Shanghainese do not judge people based on where they come from but on how good they are at their job, how well they dress and how well bred they are.

"If you are more capable than me, then fine, I highly respect you. If not, I just turn up my nose at you without any sort of pretense," he said.

"This is an ultra-competitive city. It's the way things are in Shanghai. Things may change, but we cannot realistically expect them to change overnight."

(China Daily March 23, 2010)