Funny anecdotes: it’s relatively rare to see company led by “old fart Beijingers” who have been native to the city for 2-3 generations. Immigrants have been driving the leadership there. Native Beijingers tends to be more layback and they thrive in cultural related stuff like xiangsheng, comedy and movies.
There are very few "native Beijingers." Most were sent to the countryside during the cultural revolution, and still live there.
Mostly, only very the well connected, or elite members themselves from original population managed to stay in the city through late seventies, early nineties.
The current "natives" are mostly people who descended from the new population who came into the city in seventies, and later.
That’s not remotely true. Where did you get this story from? I grew up in Beijing and my parents were sent to the countryside near the end of cultural revolution. They and most of their classmates from our neighborhood came back. My parents are not well connected or elite at all - lowest possible workers in a food factory
A lot of the educated beijingers of that generation were assigned to factories in the hinterland (my friend’s family, for example, was assigned to a smaller city in shaanxi even though they were in Beijing before the CR). It gets weird, however, when we mix authoritarian factory assignments and youth being sent down during the cultural revolution (those are very different things), given that the former could have happened anytime from 1950 to the early 90s.
The real reason native beijingers are hard to find these days in Beijing is because Beijing has grown rapidly in the last 20 years. They are “less” only because 外地人 are more. During my first trip to Beijing in 1999, the taxi driver would always be a native city Beijinger who couldn’t understand your Chinese unless you used lots of 儿话. That is no longer the case (the taxi drivers are still from Beijing, but from the outer counties rather than the central city).
Yep that’s more true - it’s an inevitable demographic shift caused by multiple factors and modernization. But I don’t think the cultural revolution play a critical role at all
