Even in China’s richest city, huge numbers of people eke out a very modest existence. To be sure, these are very often migrants from provinces like Anhui or Jiangsu, or even further afield. But more than most Chinese would suspect — particularly the proud, newly affluent generations of Shanghai people who look at my photographs and sniff “wai di ren,” or “outsiders” — a great many of the denizens of the city’s dilapidated but character-rich old quarters are natives.

Much has been written lately about growing social inequality in China. The country’s social divisions, however, are much more complicated than statistics suggest, involving lots of fine-grained, identity-based prejudices.

I think, for example, of the poor and jobless Shanghainese parents in the old garment district who told me of their eagerness to be relocated across the river to Pudong, where the environment would be better, in part they said, because there would be fewer of the “wai di” people, whom they dismissed as having “no culture.”

Image A migrant doing macrame as her children play. Credit... Howard W. French

Others pessimistically dismissed the likelihood that China’s increasing prosperity would continue to lift all boats. “I’m frightened for my son’s future,” said a migrant from Henan. “China’s biggest problem is the population. There are just too many of us, and the competition for opportunity is murderous.”

Inevitably, the theme of relocation comes up often in encounters like these, given the frantic pace of redevelopment. Some people are pleased with the take-it-or-leave-it buyout arrangements the government has offered to pave the way for the construction of high-rises; others respond with fatalism. “If the country needs this land, what can I do?” said one elderly man.

A great many people spoke bitterly and with surprising candor, though, about what they see as a crisis of social justice. Here, I think of the 75-year-old owner of a tiny barbershop whose neighborhood came down before my eyes this summer.