Why developmental citizenship, why China? An analytic introduction

1. Developmental citizenship in post-socialist China: the agenda

Since the late twentieth century, many of the former socialist countries have tried to thoroughly remold (or marketize) the socialist system of work and distribution for the sake of rapid economic development. Under the supposed exigency of rapid economic development, citizens in these transition economies have been asked to trade their socialist entitlement to work and distribution for individualized economic opportunities and risks – i.e., a transition from socialist citizenship to (market-based) developmental citizenship. In some transition countries in East Asia, developmental citizenship is also a pretext for refusing civil and political rights by the still nominally communist party-states. Developmental citizenship may not be a legally codified concept of political rule, but it is a de facto paradigm of sociopolitical governance in post-socialist reform (particularly in East Asia), by which these transition societies have gradually converged with neighboring capitalist societies in the basic sociopolitical nature of state–citizen relations (Chang 2012).

In China, among other post-socialist countries, the Communist party-state still reigns despite the rapid system transition away from socialism to an externally open market economy. Such system transition, dubbed reform (geige), has been pursued by the ruling party-state itself because it judged that sustained economic development is more important than socialist ideological principles in sustaining its political rule. In accommodating ideologically regressive policies and institutions required by the market system, the nominally communist regime has had to legitimate its continuing dictatorial power through clear developmental performance. That is, an instrumental legitimacy (based upon rapid economic development) began to be desperately sought in order to replace the increasingly thinning historical-ideological legitimacy amid the ever-worsening economic structural crisis in the late twentieth century.

Under such historical context, improving people’s material livelihood through increased jobs and higher income, often under the slogan of ‘small wellness’ (xiaokang), has become the raison-d’etre of post-socialist developmental politics. Conversely, individual citizens’ diverse traits of developmental functional utility have been strategically considered in allocating variable entitlements to work and residence. However, where pragmatist development only disadvantages or even disenfranchises certain categories of Chinese citizens, systematic new measures of social governance beyond developmental citizenship have had to be urgently devised. On the other hand, as China’s national development in the post-Mao era has implicated not only its majority citizens of domestic Han Chinese but also minority nationalities in China’s interior regions and overseas Chinese in numerous industrialized societies (such as Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore), there have arisen strategic frameworks for effectively accommodating these pan-Chinese groups through flexibly inclusionary developmental citizenship.

The current special issue on ‘Developmental Citizenship in China: Economic Reform, Social Governance, and Chinese Post-Socialism’ is intended to offer an inclusive theoretical/conceptual and empirical analysis of China’s post-socialist developmental politics and social governance in an innovative citizenship perspective. All contributions to this special issue, except the reviewer essay by Erik Mobrand, were presented at a similarly entitled international conference held by the Institute for China Studies, Seoul National University in October 2018 and have been revised and improved according to various inputs from conference participants, anonymous peer reviewers, as well as myself as the special issue editor.

2. Developmental citizenship: historical backgrounds and national varieties

While citizenship has been discussed in political theory almost as long as (Western) political theory itself, it was T. H. Marshall (1964) who contributed a path-breaking perspective on historical and theoretical advances in modern democratic citizenship. Marshall’s acumen consists in the understanding that democracy evolves (or deepens) along different sequential sets of citizenship rights – namely, civil, political, and social rights. Such evolution has been observable at least within many European industrial democracies. In the mostly imported democracies in non-Western regions, however, such historical process of political evolution or democratic deepening could not be imported as well. In particular, unlike the civil and political rights of citizens (which are usually considered as the definitional components of democracy), social rights have rarely been incorporated as the systematic core political ideology of the ruling states.

Instead, the predominant concern of both the state elites and grassroots citizens has rest with national economic development, which, in turn, is expected to ameliorate individual material livelihood. Development has commonly served as the political epistemological platform for postcolonial nations’ framing of capitalism. A sort of developmental politics has taken precedence in the everyday political processes in them. Furthermore, the supposed exigency of (rapid) national economic development has frequently been considered to legitimate the distortion or stoppage of democracy itself.¹ To the extent that development – capitalist industrialization in particular – has been nationally upheld as a state-framed collective project, it has inevitably spawned critical sociopolitical implications for citizenship.

In most of the postcolonial nations ruled by a developmentalist, democratic or not, regime, the practically observable rights and duties of ordinary citizens in relation to the state and society have predominantly revolved around national economic development and its effects on individual material livelihood. In these nations, what can be conceptualized as developmental citizenship has served as a basic framework for state-society (citizen) relations.² The state is expected or demanded to directly lead national economic development so that its citizens can benefit as voluntary economic participants in the state-promoted market system – be workers, industrialists or self-employed entrepreneurs. In modern Western politics, this issue has been neither a practical centerpiece nor directly codified in terms of constitutional provisions and major policy agenda. Consequently, the institutionally imported democracies in non-Western regions cannot conveniently rely on the West in establishing a systematic legal and/or theoretical formulation of developmental citizenship. Developmental politics as a mode of state governance and its citizenship ramifications have mostly been manifested as everyday political culture constituted by sociopolitical practices of both politico-administrative elites and ordinary citizens.

In respect to the Marshallian categories of (Western) citizenship indicated above, developmental citizenship in its socioeconomic outcomes to citizens may fall on social citizenship in a possibly broadest definition. At the same time, to the extent that the developmental(ist) state’s promotion of national economic development is a collective political act relying regularly on authoritative or authoritarian administrative measures for mobilizing and allocating scarce social resources, the publicly assured participation of all motivated able citizens in such development – that is, developmental citizenship – reflects a spirit of political citizenship. Development is politics, so developmental citizenship involves political citizenship. On the other hand, to the extent that a developmental citizen, in principle, is not immune to various socioeconomic inequalities and risks of a capitalist market economy (Li, Sato, and Sicular 2013), developmental citizenship can potentially be reduced to a simple economic denizenship (cf. Turner 2016). With all such properties combined, developmental citizenship may be characterized as a kind of political economic citizenship. By following Turner’s (1993, 2) conception of citizenship as a ‘set of practices (juridical, political, economic and cultural)’ which allows us ‘to avoid a state and juridical definition of citizenship as merely a collection of rights and obligations,’ developmental citizenship may be understood as a historical instance of political economic practices.

Development in post-socialist China – much like development in China’s industrialized capitalist neighbors – is a collective political economic project which simultaneously involves political, social, as well as economic dimensions of public governance. In such historical context, developmental citizenship is a generic category of citizenship in practice, not reducible to separate civil, political, or social rights. Improving people’s material livelihood through augmented jobs and incomes has become the raison d’etre of post-socialist dictatorial politics in China (and a host of other post-socialist nations). If the immediate rapid development of the national economy requires serious systemic revisions or reversals (including marketization and privatization), the dictatorial party-state should not hesitate trying them out and its citizenry (renmin) should appreciate and participate in them. The official ideology of ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ (Zhongguoteseshehuizhuyi) – more specifically, the socialist market economy with Chinese characteristics – implies that another version of developmental citizenship has been evolving in this transition economy under the continuing, albeit mostly nominal, communist dictatorship.³

The practical, as well as scientific, relevance of developmental citizenship may be even greater in China (and other post-socialist nations under the nominal communist dictatorship). The developmentalist rule in East Asia’s industrialized capitalist nations has politically incurred not only authoritarian tendencies in state–citizen relations but also ideological-institutional discrepancies and confusions stemming from their failure, or difficulty, in legally formalizing developmental citizenship into the (West-imported) liberal framework of polity. By contrast, post-socialist China does not have to bother with the ideological-institutional (in)compatibility of developmental citizenship with the existing formal framework of polity. The Communist party’s developmentalist dictatorship has continually been replenished with its successive supreme leaders’ ideological reinterpretations and theoretical innovations on the prime justice and key strategies in collective national prosperity – namely, ‘xianfu’ (getting rich first) and ‘black cat, white cat’ by Deng Xiaoping, ‘three representations’ by Jiang Zemin, ‘xiaokang’ (small wellness) by Xi Jinping, and so forth. It is a series of ‘great thoughts’ by the supreme leaders that have formally established and reinforced the fundamental political relevance of developmental citizenship. At the same time, its social relevance among ordinary citizenry (renmin) has been confirmed and sustained by their unprecedented material betterment resulting from the nation’s phenomenal economic growth and industrialization now over four decades.

Despite such practical relevance of developmental citizenship in post-socialist China, theoretically speaking, one may still suspect if the inherently liberal concept/institution of citizenship is applicable to any nation with its political sovereignty formally monopolized by an ideologically self-justifying party.⁴ Again, Turner’s conception of citizenship as a ‘set of practices’ enables us to decipher citizenship as practiced in China’s in-effect liberalization of its economic system, social governance, and, albeit piecemeal, local polity. Moreover, the Communist party-state has endeavored to strengthen its comparative legitimacy by highlighting China’s hitherto successful achievement in ultimately catching up with advanced capitalist nations in the West (So and Chu 2016; Lee 2013; Lee, Ji, and Eun 2011). Such propagandic approach in national development has inevitably exposed China to international and, gradually, domestic scrutiny about ordinary Chinese citizens’ basic civil, social, as well as human rights vis-à-vis those of Western citizens. (In particular, Western media have customarily observed and evaluated China in this way.) Despite these systemic changes and international comparisons, there is no clear signal that the Communist party-state is on its way to restructure the nation’s polity, society and economy along the Marshallian evolutionary trajectory of citizenship. Instead, developmental citizenship, as an all-encompassing regime of public governance, may be upheld in many years to come. Xi Jinping’s widely suspected attempt to indefinitely extend his political power has been backed up merely by his version of theory on developmental citizenship (that is, xiaokang) and almost customary anti-corruption campaigns.⁵ It seems as if Xi wished to confer developmental citizenship on his people as a supposedly all-inclusive citizenship package.

A crucial practical challenge to developmental citizenship in China’s post-socialist social governance derives from the simple fact that it is a continent-size nation with vast internal differences and diversities in socioeconomic conditions among its 1.4 billion population. Although Chinese reform centered on agricultural decollectivization and labor-intensive industrialization has been socially inclusive to a great extent (Chang 1992, 1993), it has also ramified drastically expanded inequalities by economic sector, region, nationality, occupation, education, gender, and so forth (Li, Sato, and Sicular 2013; Chang 2000). China’s developmental citizenship is far from socially exclusionary, but it is no socioeconomic – not to mention political – panacea for accommodating its ordinary citizens’ widely varied destitute and demands in livelihood. Therefore, the local states at various levels – including the provincial governments many of which serve major nation-size populations by themselves – have been both asked and allowed to organize and implement a sort of localized developmental citizenship.⁶ However, since interregional inequalities, particularly between coastal and far interior regions, have been immense and aggravating, such xiafang (sending down) of developmental governance falls short of substantially overcoming wide structural disparities in developmental citizenship. On the other hand, many of the socialist-era regulations have been recycled and reinvented in making up for various socioeconomic constraints and pitfalls of developmental citizenship. The most essential examples in this respect include hukou (compulsory local residential affiliation) for preventing excess rural-to-urban migration (Solinger 1999; Chang, 1994), danwei (social security-bound work unit) for protecting urban residents’ work and livelihood (Francis 1996), and collective farmland ownership for ensuring rural families’ universal access to food and basic income (Chang 1992). These administrative features and social conditions seem to have coalesced to generate what may be called developmental citizenship with Chinese characteristics.

A careful and comprehensive observation of post-Mao China in citizenship perspective reveals the practical centrality of developmental citizenship in post-socialist social governance. If China is compared with its industrialized capitalist neighbors such as Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan as to their common sociopolitical order of national developmentalism, the pervasive scope and systemic varieties of developmental citizenship-in-practice are easily discovered. In advancing social scientific understanding of these dynamic nations in citizenship perspective, the widespread scholarly tendency of framing research questions according to West-reflexive institutional normativities – for instance, asking how much an East Asian society institutionally approximates or deviates from the ideal-type West in those social experiences and issues historically alien to Western societies – should be urgently and fundamentally overcome. Developmental citizenship-in-practice is in no sense reducible to the Marshallian categories of citizenship that have been, on the one hand, formally incorporated in the politico-legal declarations of both Western and East Asian capitalist nations and, on the other hand, academically employed by both Western and East Asian scholars in citizenship studies and many other branches of social science. This point will be critically, comprehensively, and diversely substantiated by the subsequently summarized contributions to this special issue of Citizenship Studies on ‘Developmental citizenship in China: economic reform, social governance, and Chinese post-socialism’.

3. Summary of the contributions

In ‘Developmental pluralism and stratified developmental citizenship: an alternative perspective on Chinese post-socialism’, I present an alternative account of China’s gradual reform by focusing on the citizenship implications of institutionally pluralist development. The so-called ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’, in practice, has been characterized by not only the active accommodation of market economic rules and capitalist practices but also the inventive reuse of many socialist-era institutions and regulations in carefully managing post-socialist development in socially controllable manners. Chinese people’s developmental citizenship has been institutionally segmented and socially moderated under such intricate amalgamation of socialist and post-socialist institutional apparatuses.

Yoon Jongseok’s contribution, ‘The local state and nongmingong citizenship in Guangdong: local welfare as developmental contributory rights’, systematically analyzes the contentious socioeconomic status of informal migrant workers (mostly from villages) as critically shaped by the local urban government’s strategic policy of selectively accommodating developmentally worthy workers through a sort of conditional hukou (residential permit) system. Urban hukou is practically an internal social citizenship regime, so its accessibility in return for certain migrant workers’ developmental contribution presents a highly interesting and suggestive episode in the in-effect evolution of citizenship rights in the developmentalist governance of post-socialist China. Another exciting episode of informal migrants’ developmental citizenship, while not dealt with in this special issue, is revealed in specific regional origin-based enclaves of migrants in major metropolises, some of which have even attempted, not unsuccessfully, to establish their own Communist party branches on the basis of accumulated developmental contributions to the respective local economies (see Jeong and Yoon 2020).

Woojong Moon, in ‘Corporate social vs. developmental responsibility: corporate citizenship in the restructuring of China’s pharmaceutical industry’, offers an inclusive account of corporate citizenship in the pharmaceutical industry. He discloses the inherent conflicts between corporate social responsibilities and developmental contributions, in particular as embodied in the segregative stance of the Chinese government toward native and transnational firms. While corporate social responsibility is duly emphasized by the Chinese authority in conjunction with the special public nature of the pharmaceutical industry, its enforcement has been uneven according to the often arbitrary consideration of corporate developmental utilities in which native Chinese firms and transnational firms are perceived differently, if not discriminatorily. Such segregative acknowledgment of corporate developmental citizenship was evidently manifested when the Chinese regulatory authority dealt with serious corporate misdeeds by Chinese and transnational firms with apparent double standards.

In ‘Infrastructural developmental citizenship: Chinese lawyers and state-framed marketization’, Dongjin Lee explains how economic marketization and judicial reform in post-Mao China have coalesced to generate a unique institutional-political context in which Chinese lawyers are practically ordained to serve as market-based developmental functionary while compromising their potential as civil(ian) rights defender. Their legal service in configuring and resolving conflicts among variably autonomous economic interests, mostly at high financial and/or political stakes, is indispensable to the developmentalist party-state in promoting market-based economic development. However, such developmental contribution of lawyers is chronically distorted and/or manipulated under the political economic order of state-segmented marketization. It is also potentially divisive to grassroots people’s interests due to the judicially amplified economic inequalities under expensively paid legal services and the consequently scarce provision of judicial assistance in basic civilian rights. Chinese lawyers’ ‘infrastructural developmental citizenship’ is premised upon a fundamentally compromised rule of law.

The contribution by Park Woo, Robert Easthope, and Chang Kyung-Sup, ‘China’s ethnic minority and neoliberal developmental citizenship: Yanbian Koreans in perspective’ presents a comprehensive picture of the constantly reconfigured citizenship of Chaoxianzu (Korean Chinese) in Northeast China. The central party-state leadership’s concern in effectively controlling the minority nationalities amid rapid socioeconomic liberalization under reform resulted in the socialist ideological reinforcement of their political membership in this internal colonialist nation. At the regional level, however, many local states have endeavored to tailor post-socialist development to their respective resource endowments and grassroots demands – in the case of Yanbian (an autonomous prefecture of ethnic Koreans), socioeconomic linkages with the industrialized South Korea. At the private level, innumerable Chaoxianzu families and individuals have attempted to strategically transnationalize their basis for work and livelihood by exploring socioeconomic opportunities within South Korea. Both the Yanbian government’s aspiration for developmentally linking with South Korea and Chaoxianzu people’s pursuit of new opportunities within or with South Korea have been warmly and usefully accommodated under South Korea’s aggressive neoliberal globalization since its financial crisis in the late 1990s. Yanbian Koreans’ post-socialist citizenship has been intricately amalgamated from national, local, and transnational purposes in developmental politics.

James K. Wong and Alvin Y. So, in ‘The remaking of developmental citizenship in post-handover Hong Kong’, analyze the inherent sociopolitical collisions between mainland China’s politically designed attempt to developmentally incorporate Hong Kong and its citizens and Hong Kongers’ resolute determination to preserve their sociopolitical autonomy. Despite Hong Kong’s general background as a community of supposedly enterprising citizens during the British reign, Beijing’s promotion of cross-straight developmental citizenship has largely failed in effectively founding ordinary Hong Kongers’ loyalty to mainland China through developmental opportunities and compensations. The fervent anti-extradition struggle of Hong Kongers in 2019 clearly demonstrated that they have no intention to swap their civil and political rights for whatever developmental benefits suggested by Beijing.

In ‘Developmental citizenship, symbolic landscapes, and transformation in China and South Korea’, Erik Mobrand offers a lucid comparative account of China and South Korea in developmental citizenship, which enlightens how some critical limits in the prevalent scholarship on the two countries’ sociopolitical and economic transformations can be meaningfully overcome. Ironically, it is the common structural and cultural features of developmental politics beneath the two countries’ widely different political institutions, ideologies, and histories that most critically characterize the actual substances and qualities of political rule and social governance. Mobrand offers highly persuasive elaborations on the constitutive components of developmental citizenship in the concrete historical contexts of China and South Korea, thereby helping to advance its theoretical and empirical utility in international scholarship on citizenship, comparative politics, and East Asia.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Chang Kyung-Sup

Chang Kyung-Sup is a professor of sociology at Seoul National University. His work on comparative development and citizenship has appeared in World Development, Journal of Development Studies, Economy and Society, as well as Citizenship Studies. His related books include Contested Citizenship in East Asia: Developmental Politics, National Unity, and Globalization (coedited with Bryan S. Turner, Routledge, 2012), Developmental Politics in Transition: The Neoliberal Era and Beyond (coedited with Ben Fine and Linda Weiss, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), and Citizenship in Compressed Modernity: Transformative Contributory Rights in Korean Society (forthcoming). (Email: [email protected])

Notes

1. This phenomenon of developmental authoritarianism has not only been a widespread historical reality but also produced an influential functionalist theory on authoritarian politics in Third World countries (Huntington 1968). For a highly critical view on China in this respect, see Pei (2006), China’s Trapped Transition.

2. I have attempted here and in other works to explain how citizenship – developmental citizenship in particular – in East Asia has been conceived, protracted, and habitually renewed amid the dynamic interplay between political democratization and capitalist economic development and what social practices have constituted such historical constructions and reconstructions of (developmental) citizenship (Chang 2012, 2014; Chang and Turner 2012).

3. One may wonder if developmental citizenship was also practiced during the classic state-socialist era in China and elsewhere. In theory (or ideology), it was class affiliation, not citizenship, that formally identified the socioeconomic and political status of each individual (Goodman 2014). The Communist party’s dictatorship was premised upon its universal representation of proletariat as the only historically justifiable social class. However, there arose a sort of in-effect developmental citizenship, particularly when the Maoist catchup development was pursued by forcefully and even violently mobilizing all grassroots Chinese during the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s (Riskin 1987).

4. See Roulleau-Berger (2016), Post-Western Revolution in Sociology: From China to Europe, for a lucid comparative discussion of citizenship between China and Europe.

5. The frequently repeated anti-corruption campaign against political elites reflects not only the party-state’s internal power struggle but also, more crucially, a political strategy to symbolically reproduce the social legitimacy of the Communist party’s monopoly over political power (that is, its permanent denial of grassroots political citizenship).

6. Amid intense media attention, some provincial governors and party secretaries became quite prominent in this regard and made their way into Beijing’s power bloc, or aroused fear to their (potential) political competitors, who would try to sack them whenever possible. Also, according to Cho (2009), many local People’s Congresses have produced significant impacts on the way post-socialist reform is realized in their respective areas. See Chung (2016) for a lucid comprehensive account of the central-local relations in China.