Developmental Citizenship in China Economic Reform, Social Governance, and Chinese Post-Socialism

This book offers the very first collaborative analysis of various conditions and aspects of developmental citizenship in China and its practical and ideological implications for Chinese post-socialism.

Development in post-socialist China ? much like development in China?s industrialized capitalist neighbors ? is a collective political economic project which simultaneously involves political, social, as well as economic dimensions of public governance. In such a historical context, developmental citizenship is a generic category of citizenship in practice, not reducible to separate civil, political, or social rights. Improving people?s material livelihood through augmented jobs and incomes has become the raison d?etre of post-socialist dictatorial politics in China (and a host of other post-socialist nations). A careful and comprehensive observation of post-Mao China in citizenship perspective reveals the practical centrality of developmental citizenship in post-socialist social governance. If China is compared with its industrialized capitalist neighbors such as Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan as to their common sociopolitical order of national developmentalism, the pervasive scope and systemic varieties of developmental citizenship-in-practice are easily discovered.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Citizenship Studies.

Introduction: Why developmental citizenship, why China? An analytic introduction 1. Developmental pluralism and stratified developmental citizenship: an alternative perspective on Chinese post-socialism 2. The local state and nongmingong citizenship in Guangdong: local welfare as developmental contributory rights 3. Corporate social vs. developmental responsibility: corporate citizenship in the restructuring of China’s pharmaceutical industry 4. Infrastructural developmental citizenship: Chinese lawyers and state-framed marketization 5. China’s ethnic minority and neoliberal developmental citizenship: Yanbian Koreans in perspective 6. The re-making of developmental citizenship in post-handover Hong Kong 7. Developmental citizenship, symbolic landscapes, and transformation in China and South Korea

Chang Kyung-Sup is Professor of Sociology at Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea. His work on Chinese development has been published in World Development, Journal of Development Studies, Economy and Society, Rationality and Society, etc. His books on Asian citizenship include: Contested Citizenship in East Asia: Developmental Politics, National Unity, and Globalization (coedited with Bryan S. Turner, 2012); Transformative Citizenship in South Korea: Politics of Transformative Contributory Rights (2021), and more.