Mass capture: the making of non-citizens and the Mainland Travel Permit for Hong Kong and Macau Residents

Abstract

Through an examination of the Mainland Travel Permit for Hong Kong and Macau Residents, this paper argues that there is a disjuncture between the idea of home and citizenship for mobile Chinese subjects and that this disjuncture reveals the crucial and constant work of defining non-citizens in order to safeguard citizenship. That is, non-citizens are essential for the definition of citizenship. Non-citizens are not simply there, as refugees, migrants, or stateless people. Rather, the state must engage in constant project of defining them through a process that I identify as mass capture. I develop the concept of mass capture by engaging with Agre’s work differentiating surveillance from capture. Agre’s insistence upon capture as a process that has a grammar, and thus a process that demands the intricacies of reading, allows for a way of understanding the state’s large-scale collection of personal data in terms that take up surveillance as a logic of legibility.

Keywords:

• Mass capture
• citizenship
• non-citizens
• identity cards

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Sara Rozenberg for her superb research assistance. I would also like to thank the editors of this Special Issue and the anonymous reviewers of this article. Their comments and suggestions have been invaluable.

Notes

1. Explanations of some questions by the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress concerning the implementation of the Nationality Law of the People’s Republic of China in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (adopted at the Nineteenth Session of the Standing Committee of the Eighth National People’s Congress on 15 May 1996). These ‘Explanations’ clarified the PRC’s position in relation to people of Chinese descent in Hong Kong by, among other items, re-affirming the principles of jus sanguinis: ‘Where a Hong Kong resident is of Chinese descent and was born in the Chinese territories (including Hong Kong), or where a person satisfies the criteria laid down in the Nationality Law of the People's Republic of China for having Chinese nationality, he is a Chinese national’ (qtd in Yeung 2001, 36).