Sophia Woodman - Practicing Citizenship in Contemporary China

This book examines citizenship as practised in China today from a variety of angles. Citizenship in Chinaand elsewhere in the Global Southhas often been perceived as either a distorted echo of the real democratic version in Europe and North America or an orientalised 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.

Sophia Woodman is a Chancellors Fellow in Sociology in the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh, UK. Her research interests include citizenship, human rights and social movements in contemporary China; political sociology and social movements, particularly transnational movements; constitutionalism, law, politics and governance in modern China and beyond; and gender and the state.

Zhonghua Guo is a Professor of Politics in the School of Government at Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China and a Research Fellow at the Sun Yat-sen Chinese Public Management Research Center, China. His research interests include political science theory and Chinese government and politics.

First published 2019

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The chapters in this book were originally published in the journal Citizenship Studies, volume 21, issue 7 (August 2017). When citing this material, please use the original page numbering for each article, as follows:

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Yu Ding is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Work at Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China. Her research interests include gender issues and womens everyday lives and desires, especially under Chinas modernization and globalization, including ruralurban discrepancy, the sex industry and sex workers in China and feminist social work and marriage and family issues.

Bing Guan is affiliated with the Center for Chinese Public Administration Research in the School of Government at Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China. His research focuses on the area of political sociology, including citizenship, political participation and media autonomy.

Zhonghua Guo is a Professor of Politics at the School of Government at Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China. He has been doing research on citizenship studies. He has authored three books on this subject, including The Core Issues of Citizenship, Theorizing Chinese Citizenship, Citizenship in Changing Societies, and has edited several special issues in journals with good reputation, including Citizenship Studies, Journal of Chinese Political Science.

Miao Li is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at Shandong University, Jinan, China. Her research interests include youth culture, citizenship education, class formation, social mobility, and qualitative research methodology.