The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Citizenship

The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Citizenship
Author: Zhonghua Guo
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 688
Release: 2021-11-29
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1000472299

Two assumptions prevail in the study of Chinese citizenship: one holds that citizenship is unique to the Western political culture, and China has historically lacked the necessary conditions for its development; the other implies that China is an authoritarian regime that has always been subject to autocratic power, in which citizens and citizenship play a limited role. This volume negates both assumptions. On the one hand, it shows that China has its own unique and rich experiences of the emergence, development, rights, obligations, acts, culture, education, and sites of citizenship, indicating the need to widen the scope of citizenship studies to include non-Western societies. On the other hand, it aims to show that citizenship has been a core issue running through China's political development since the modern period, urging scholars to bring ‘citizenship’ into consideration in the study of Chinese politics. This Handbook sets a new agenda for citizenship studies and Chinese politics. Its clear, accessible style makes it essential reading for students and scholars interested in citizenship and China studies.

Contesting Citizenship in Urban China

Contesting Citizenship in Urban China
Author: Dorothy J. Solinger
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 467
Release: 1999-05-17
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0520217969

Post-Mao market reforms in China have led to a massive migration of rural peasants toward the cities. Denied urban residency, this "floating population" provides labour but loses out on government benefits. This study challenges the notion that markets promote rights and legal equality.

Theorizing Chinese Citizenship

Theorizing Chinese Citizenship
Author: Zhonghua Guo
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 259
Release: 2015-10-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 149851670X

This volume theorizes the concept of citizenship in contemporary China by probing into the formation of Chinese citizenship and synthesizing the practices of citizenship by different social groups. The first section, “Imagining Chinese Citizenship,” analyses how Chinese citizenship was first imagined by means of translation and education at the beginning of the twentieth century. The Chinese citizenship was then compared with the concept of Western citizenship and that of other Asian countries. The second section, “Citizenship of Chinese Migrant Workers,” explains the citizenship status of migrant workers by discussing the relationship between household registration (hukou) system and citizenship of the migrant workers, showing how migrant workers contest their citizenship rights and categorizing the resistance of migrant workers from the perspective of citizenship. Finally, the last section, “Chinese Citizenship Education,” discusses the conditions and challenges of citizenship education in Chinese schools.

Chinese Citizenship

Chinese Citizenship
Author: Vanessa L. Fong
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2006-05-30
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1134195966

Bringing a new dimension to the study of citizenship, Chinese Citizenship examines how individuals at the margins of Chinese society deal with state efforts to transform them into model citizens in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Based on extensive original research, the authors argue that social and cultural citizenship has a greater impact on people’s lives than legal, civil and political citizenship. The seven case studies present intimate portraits of the conflicted identities of peasants, criminals, ethnic minorities, the urban poor, rural migrant children in the cities, mainland migrants in Hong Kong and Chinese youth studying abroad, as they negotiate the perilous dilemmas presented by globalization and neoliberalism. Drawing on a diverse array of theories and methods from anthropology, sociology, education, political science, cultural studies and development studies, the book presents fresh perspectives and highlights the often devastating consequences that citizenship distinctions can have on Chinese lives.

Changing Meanings of Citizenship in Modern China

Changing Meanings of Citizenship in Modern China
Author: Merle Goldman
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 488
Release: 2002-06-30
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780674037762

This collection of essays addresses the meaning and practice of political citizenship in China over the past century, raising the question of whether reform initiatives in citizenship imply movement toward increased democratization. After slow but steady moves toward a new conception of citizenship before 1949, there was a nearly complete reversal during the Mao regime, with a gradual reemergence beginning in the Deng era of concerns with the political rights as well as the duties of citizens. The distinguished contributors to this volume address how citizenship has been understood in China from the late imperial era to the present day, the processes by which citizenship has been fostered or undermined, the influence of the government, the different development of citizenship in mainland China and Taiwan, and the prospects of strengthening citizens' rights in contemporary China. Valuable for its century-long perspective and for placing the historical patterns of Chinese citizenship within the context of European and American experiences, Changing Meanings of Citizenship in Modern China investigates a critical issue for contemporary Chinese society.

Paradise Redefined

Paradise Redefined
Author: Vanessa Fong
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2011-08-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0804781753

In 2004, Vanessa Fong offered a groundbreaking ethnographic exploration of the social, economic, and psychological development of children born since China's one-child policy was introduced in 1979. Her book Only Hope left readers with a picture of stressed, ambitious adolescents for whom elite status was the ultimate goal, though relatively few were in a position to achieve it. In Paradise Redefined, Fong tracks the experiences of many in her initial cohort of Chinese only-children—now college-age—as they study abroad in Australia, Europe, Japan, New Zealand, North America, and Singapore. While earning a prestigious college education in China is the main path to elite status, study abroad provides an alternative channel by offering a particularly flexible "developed world" citizenship. This flexible citizenship promises the potential for greater happiness and freedom afforded by transnational mobility, but also brings with it unexpected suffering, ambivalence, and disappointment. Paradise Redefined offers insights into China's globalization by examining the expectations and experiences that affect how various Chinese students make decisions about studying abroad, staying abroad, immigration, and returning home.

Chinese Student Migration and Selective Citizenship

Chinese Student Migration and Selective Citizenship
Author: Lisong Liu
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2015-08-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317446240

Since China began its open-door and reform policies in 1978, more than three million Chinese students have migrated to study abroad, and the United States has been their top destination. The recent surge of students following this pattern, along with the rising tide of Chinese middle- and upper-classes' emigration out of China, have aroused wide public and scholarly attention in both China and the US. This book examines the four waves of Chinese student migration to the US since the late 1970s, showing how they were shaped by the profound changes in both nations and by US-China relations. It discusses how student migrants with high socioeconomic status transformed Chinese American communities and challenged American immigration laws and race relations. The book suggests that the rise of China has not negated the deeply rooted "American dream" that has been constantly reinvented in contemporary China. It also addresses the theme of "selective citizenship" – a way in which migrants seek to claim their autonomy - proposing that this notion captures the selective nature on both ends of the negotiations between nation-states and migrants. It cautions against a universal or idealized "dual citizenship" model, which has often been celebrated as a reflection of eroding national boundaries under globalization. This book draws on a wide variety of sources in Chinese and English, as well as extensive fieldwork in both China and the US, and its historical perspective sheds new light on contemporary Chinese student migration and post-1965 Chinese American community. Bridging the gap between Asian and Asian American studies, the book also integrates the studies of migration, education, and international relations. Therefore, it will be of interest to students of these fields, as well as Chinese history and Asian American history more generally.

Citizens in Motion

Citizens in Motion
Author: Elaine Lynn-Ee Ho
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 201
Release: 2018-12-18
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1503607461

More than 35 million Chinese people live outside China, but this population is far from homogenous, and its multifaceted national affiliations require careful theorization. This book unravels the multiple, shifting paths of global migration in Chinese society today, challenging a unilinear view of migration by presenting emigration, immigration, and re-migration trajectories that are occurring continually and simultaneously. Drawing on interviews and ethnographic observations conducted in China, Canada, Singapore, and the China–Myanmar border, Elaine Lynn-Ee Ho takes the geographical space of China as the starting point from which to consider complex patterns of migration that shape nation-building and citizenship, both in origin and destination countries. She uniquely brings together various migration experiences and national contexts under the same analytical framework to create a rich portrait of the diversity of contemporary Chinese migration processes. By examining the convergence of multiple migration pathways across one geographical region over time, Ho offers alternative approaches to studying migration, migrant experience, and citizenship, thus setting the stage for future scholarship.

The Meaning of Citizenship in Contemporary Chinese Society

The Meaning of Citizenship in Contemporary Chinese Society
Author: Sicong Chen
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 172
Release: 2017-09-13
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9811063230

This book is a direct and empirical response to the mounting official interest in citizenship education, increasing dynamics between state and society, and growing citizenship awareness and practice in society in contemporary China. Placing the focus on society, the book investigates the meaning of the Chinese term gongmin – equivalent to ‘citizen’ – in non-official media discourses and in university students’ and migrant workers’ perceptions, through the constructed analytical lens of Western citizenship conception. By laying out the complex details of how the meaning of the term resembles and deviates in and between collective social discourses and individual citizens’ understandings with reference to state discourses, the book makes clear that there is discrepancy in the meaning of gongmin between state and society and that the meaning varies in contemporary Chinese society. Cutting across multiple topics, this book is a valuable resource for students and researchers interested in Chinese citizenship, East-West citizenship, citizenship education, the media, university students and migrant workers in China.

Practicing Citizenship in Contemporary China

Practicing Citizenship in Contemporary China
Author: Sophia Woodman
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 162
Release: 2020-04-02
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0429806906

This book examines citizenship as practiced in China today from a variety of angles. Citizenship in China—and elsewhere in the Global South—has often 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. By contrast, this book sees Chinese citizenship as an aspect of a connected modernity that is still unfolding. The book focuses on three key tensions: 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. Examining 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. This book was originally published as a Special Issue of the journal Citizenship Studies.