The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Citizenship

Zhonghua Guo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781032127095
• eBook ISBN: 9781000472295
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

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.

Part IHistorical development

DOI: 10.4324/9781003225843-2

1CITIZENS AND CITIZENSHIP IN CHINA: HOW THESE IDEAS EMERGED

Peter Harris

DOI: 10.4324/9781003225843-3

Citizens and citizenship are once again a topic for debate. This is not an allusion to the persistent crises in America, Europe and Australia currently being brought about by flows of migrants and refugees in search of new homes and new citizenship. Rather, it is a reference to ongoing discussions about citizen activism and the role of citizens in a globalised world, both within states and across their borders. These discussions, echoing debates sparked off more than half a century ago by T. H. Marshall’s formative work on citizenship,¹ have focused not only on the positive parts to be played by citizens in the Western world, given the chronic anxieties affecting liberal democracies since the Global Financial Crisis of 2008–2009, but also on the concept of citizenship in China, whose emergence as a formidable player in global affairs has raised questions about its model of government and the role of its ruling Communist Party and its people.

The term ‘citizen’ still often carries with it a cold, legalistic quality, as reflected in the fact that in a large number of communities and languages, including many in Asia, the word citizen often describes members of a state – or, in the case of non-citizens, those excluded from it – only when other more culturally distinct and inclusive words fail. That said, ‘citizen’ is also often used as a word with much warmer connotations of community, participation and policy-making, ones to be set against the vagaries of an ill-managed world.²

While many of these differing attitudes and approaches to citizenship derive largely from European and American history, they are also to be found in ideas of citizenship as they have been formed and re-formed in other major cultures and civilisations, including those of China. In China, the concepts of citizen and citizenship emerged during the period of intense discussion, debate and political activity involving a new generation of Chinese intellectuals from the 1890s to the 1920s. Thereafter the idea of citizen was eclipsed for half a century by the exigencies of war and revolution, but has since experienced something of a revival, in the People’s Republic after the death of Mao and the eclipse of Maoist orthodoxy, and in Taiwan because of democratising reforms there.

The main purpose of this chapter is to review the early development of the idea of citizenship in China, and to consider where and how it emerged. As a first step, it may be worth revisiting the evolution of the idea of citizenship within the European intellectual tradition, primarily as a means of putting in context those elements of it that were adaptable to Chinese circumstances.

European uses of the concept of citizen, conveying some sense of civic right or duty, date back to classical Greek and Roman times. As every student of politics knows, in the fourth century BCE Aristotle defined a citizen (πολίτης, polites) as someone with civic standing and responsibility, and more specifically as someone who “shares in the administration of justice and in the holding of office” in a city (πόλις, polis) (Aristotle 1995:85).³ Aristotle’s and the Greeks’ definition was a relatively circumscribed one, confined to free men in cities – a point the Chinese scholar Liang Qichao 梁啓超 was to make when introducing the concept of citizenship to a Chinese audience in the early 1900s.

The English word ‘citizen’, from the French citoyen, derives its meaning from the Latin civis (citizen), cognate with civitas (city). The word civis is also the etymological root of the words ‘civil’ and ‘civic’, with the result that in some senses, for example, in the expression ‘civil rights’, the adjective ‘civil’ more or less pertains to the noun citizen, whereas in other usages – as in the term ‘civil society’ – it has acquired a meaning in English related to, but separate from, the notion of citizenship. This is not, however, true of the term ‘civil society’ as it is currently used in a number of non-anglophone political cultures, where its relationship to terms used for citizen may be close or distant, depending on accidents of linguistic history and translation. In China and other Sinic languages, the term ‘civil society’ is rendered in various ways, among them (in Chinese) by the terms gongmin shehui 公民社會 and shimin Shehui 市民社會, the first meaning literally, ‘citizens’ society’, the terms civil and citizens being treated as synonymous, and the second ‘the society of city people’. On the other hand, in China’s regional neighbour Indonesia, to take just one other example, the terms most commonly used for citizen and civil society – warga negara and masyarakat sipil – are not etymologically connected at all.⁴

The identification in European cultures of citizenry with city-dwellers was sustained well into the nineteenth century, and across Europe provided the linguistic foundation on which modern words for citizen and citizenship was built. (According to Orlando Figes, the exception to this rule was Ukraine, where the word for citizen was derived from the Ukrainian word for village assembly)⁵ (Figes 1997: 77). By then, however, the rationalist, universalist influence of the Enlightenment, and of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s political philosophy in particular, was broadening the scope of the concept to encompass the inhabitants of a larger realm than just the city. In The Social Contract Rousseau reflected the changing, ambiguous political circumstances of the time by stating clearly that the term citoyen meant only city-dweller, and then applied the term to anyone living in a republic, a political entity that by that time consisted of a city and sometimes more besides⁶ (Rousseau 1968: 10).

During the French revolution the common title citoyen was used to underline the revolution’s egalitarian, libertarian goals. Thereafter it became increasingly associated with republicanism, although in many settings throughout the world – including China in the final years of the Qing Dynasty – advocates of citizenship included constitutional monarchists, among them, notably, Liang Qichao. In contrast to its universalist ideals, the French revolution also ushered in another sense of citizenship, one tied to the idea of nation and nationhood. As Simon Schama puts it, “[s]uddenly, subjects were told they had become Citizens; an aggregate of subjects held in place by injustice and intimidation had become a Nation” (Schama 1990: 859).

Thereafter, two overlapping but contradictory sets of political ideals coexisted. The first embodied the universalist ambitions of the European Enlightenment. These were usually expressed in terms of a rational, well-managed and enlightened state consisting of citizens with equal rights and responsibilities. They were also reflected in the aspirations of radical socialism, even the procrustean socialism of Karl Marx, for whom the state was a temporary construct arising during the historical progress of dialectical materialism.

The second set of ideals was made up of the particularist intentions of increasingly self-conscious nations and nationalists, seeking to ensure the primacy of their own identity as defined in terms of culture, community and race or ethnicity, often by creating a state to protect and embody it.⁷ The conflicts and inconsistencies between these two sets of ideals were to be important elements of many debates about citizenship and the state, both in Europe and in China.

Meanwhile there developed in practice in mid- to late nineteenth-century Europe several different forms of citizenship. Significant among these were the more active, participatory forms of citizenship in France and the United States, and the more passive forms of citizenship of Bismarckian and post-Bismarckian Germany, where the state was seen as the principal source of public authority and statist conceptions of citizenship prevailed.⁸

It was to this accumulated legacy that Chinese intellectuals and political activists in the late Qing brought their own rich and distinct lineages of political thought. These lineages corresponded relatively well to some elements of the European experience. These included: the origins of citizenship in cities rather than the countryside; the broadening of the definition of citizenship to embrace first the republic, and later the universal ideals of the French revolution; and the identification of citizenship in the late nineteenth century with the concept of the nation and, by extension or alternatively, of the state.⁹ It was left to reform-minded Chinese intellectuals to integrate European features of citizenship into the dense array of ideas, assumptions, practices and changing norms concerning the individual, society, the state and the realm (meaning primarily the imperial concept of tianxia 天下, all under heaven, that is, the known world) that informed their own political perspectives.

Thus it was that the idea of citizenship came into being in China against a backdrop of disparate conceptions of the state and the nation, conceptions that informed not just the theory and practice of citizenship, but also its vocabulary. These conceptions can be characterised in various ways but, for the purpose of this discussion, are most conveniently described as belonging to three main streams of thought.

The first, exemplified by scholars such as Kang Youwei 康有爲 – at least, Kang in his idealistic frame of mind, rather than Kang the practical scholar-official – and Tan Sitong 譚嗣同, drew on ru 儒, Buddhist and other intellectual traditions to espouse a universalist idealism that regarded statehood and nationhood as, at best, a political stage in a transition between the culturalist world of tianxia and a world reunited in moral harmony. This world of moral harmony was the world of da tong 大同, great unity or great community, a concept that gave its name to Kang’s best-known book, Da tong shu 大同書 or The Book of Great Unity (1956).¹⁰

This was a stream of thinking that was also apparent from the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Navigating Chinese citizenship
• Part I Historical development
• Part II Rights and obligations
• Part III Citizenship acts
• Part IV Cultural citizenship
• Part V Citizenship education
• Part VI Citizenship in special regions
• Index