Chinese Citizenship: Views from the Margins (Routledge Studies on the Chinese Economy)

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.

Vanessa L. Fong is an Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University. Her publications include Only Hope: Coming of Age under China's One-Child Policy (Stanford University Press, 2004), Women in Republican China (co-edited with Hua R. Lan, M.E. Sharpe, 1999), and articles on identity, nationalism, globalization, gender and population in China.

Rachel Murphy is a research fellow in the Contemporary Chinese Studies Programme and Pembroke College, University of Oxford. Her publications include How Migrant Labour is Changing Rural China (Cambridge University Press, 2002) and articles on rural development, entrepreneurship, education, gender and population in China.