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.