This research employs critical theories of citizenship to investigate the role of rural-to-urban migrant workers in the construction and transformation of citizenship in China. Migrant workers have long been portrayed as uncivilised and uncultured Others in contrast to the modern and urban Self in China. This binary discourse has been accompanied and strengthened by a citizenship regime based on the hukou (household registration) system, whereby access to citizenship rights in the cities is only provided for those registered as urban-hukou-holders and is thus denied to rural migrants. Through the analysis of findings from a year of fieldwork conducted among non-governmental organisations (NGOs) established by migrant workers in China, I enquire into the new ways of conceiving citizenship in China. These are the ways which go beyond the bifurcated rural-urban citizenship status and the passivity of docile and neoliberal subjects, and which instead transform citizenship via the self-remaking of migrant workers into 'worker-citizens', who utilise the urban as a new space of struggle for belonging and rights. This self-transformation is conducted through ‘acts of citizenship’, that is acts which challenge the contemporary citizenship construction in China and which simultaneously transform the performer into an activist citizen (Isin and Nielsen, 2008). By looking at how migrant workers perform ‘acts of citizenship’ around the three ‘sites’ of NGOs, labour and space, this research contends that citizenship in China does not have to be bound to the set of rights defined by the state, but rather that it can be remade by the active participation in politics of those who are normally excluded as non-citizens.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:647439 |
| Date | January 2015 |
| Creators | Jakimow, Malgorzata Jadwiga |
| Publisher | University of Manchester |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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