ABSTRACT
In 2008, Bao migrated to Shanghai from a village that lies in the hills some 600 kilometres away. As a consequence, he now occupies a different place in life, not just in terms of geography, but also in terms of his family, his socioeconomic position and his sense of self. Arguably, the most significant move for Bao among all of these forms of mobility was his move from the village's well-defined close-knit community — with all that implies — to the city's quite different topographies of intersubjectivity, social and economic structures and social dynamics. According to many who make the argument for the significance of community (e.g. Bauman 2001; Nancy 1991; Nisbet 1953), in taking that train-trip Bao and his mobile generation are both instigating and suffering an important loss — the loss of community. In this argument ‘community’ is a social good of profound importance, and even if the most romanticised representations of community life don't exist in Bao's village — and have in fact never existed anywhere — then all the more reason to mourn its absence, to reinvent it, and to valorise it as the gold-standard of sociality, for its resistance to the values of both individualism and statism (Nisbet 1953: ix).
