Introduction: practicing citizenship in contemporary China

Abstract

Citizenship in China – and elsewhere in the global South – has been perceived as either a distorted echo of the ‘real’ democratic version in Europe and North America, or an orientalized ‘other’ that defines what citizenship is not. In contrast, adopting a ‘connected histories’ perspective makes Chinese citizenship a constitutive part of a modernity that is still unfolding. Since the nineteenth century, concerns about citizenship have been central to debates about the building of state and society in China. Some of these concerns are echoed in key tensions related to the practices of citizenship in China today, particularly in three areas: a state preference for sedentarism and governing citizens in place vs. growing mobility, sometimes facilitated by the state; a perception that state-building and development requires a strong state vs. ideas and practices of participatory citizenship; and submission of the individual to the ‘collective’ (state, community, village, family etc.) vs. the rising salience of conceptions of self-development and self-making projects. Exploring manifestations of these tensions can contribute to thinking about citizenship beyond China, including the role of the local in forming citizenship orders; how individualization works in the absence of liberal individualism; and how ‘social citizenship’ is increasingly becoming a reward to ‘good citizens’, rather than a mechanism for achieving citizen equality.

Keywords:

• Chinese citizenship
• orientalism
• connected histories
• social citizenship
• individualization

Notes

1. Reflecting her feminist commitments, He-Yin chose to combine the family names of both her parents as her own surname.

2. The most comprehensive treatment is in Wang 2005; but see also chapter on internal migration in Nyíri 2010.

3. The Chinese term, Zhonghua minzu, incorporates the sense of both nation and ‘race.’ In a shift away from a previous emphasis on distinctions between ‘national’ ethnic groups such as Han and Tibetan, since the 1990s, the state has sought to emphasize the inclusion of all minorities residing within the territory of the PRC into this umbrella category.