Title: Chinese citizenship ‘after orientalism’: academic narratives on internal migrants in China
Abstract: Abstract In this article I enquire into the possibility of citizenship ‘after orientalism’ by examining the writing of Chinese academics on internal migrants in China. The popular narratives on migrants represent them as ‘peasant workers in need of becoming urban citizens’. These representations are based on an understanding of citizenship as necessarily urban and modern, which is reminiscent of Weber's theory of citizenship, and is based on mechanisms of ‘internal orientalism’. I argue that contrary to the popular understanding of ‘post-oriental’ as ‘resistance to the West’, it is the process of the boundary-transgression between rural and urban, rather than non-Western ideas of citizenship, that opens space for citizenship ‘after orientalism’ in China. This process of boundary-transgression can be mapped through new practices of naming and narrative-setting in the literature on internal migrants, which emphasise subjective character of group boundaries and appeal for recognition of rural and migrant identities. It is through these instances of boundary-transgression between urban and rural that the orientalism embedded within the notion of citizenship in China is challenged. Keywords: citizenship in Chinainternal migrantsinternal orientalismChinese academicsboundary-transgressionMax Weber Acknowledgements I would like to thank Elena Barabantseva, William A. Callahan, Astrid Nordin and David Tobin for their comments on the drafts of this article. Notes All translations from Chinese in this article were done by the author. 1. While referring to Western European and American scholarship and philosophical foundations as ‘Western’ throughout this article might be viewed as a reproduction of orientalist categories, I find it necessary for the cohesion of the argument and to relate to literature on orientalism which uses these notions extensively. Throughout the article, I rather intend to demonstrate how the essentialised usage of these concepts hinders development of scholarship ‘after orientalism’. 2. There is also a separate term for ‘citizenship’, as in ‘passport holding’ of guoji, which I do not include into the discussion. 3. The criticism of such widespread and uncritical usage of ‘Western’ methods and concepts in Chinese academia was raised by Peng (Citation2007, p. 67). His criticism, however, still echoes the anti-Western, orientalist and nationalist sentiments.