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Citizenship in China: a Comparison of Rights with the East and West

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Abstract

After the economic rise of China with the improvement in their standard of living, there have been many changes in the rights of citizens in China. This paper provides a broad survey of rights to see how China compares with the West and some countries in the Far East. This comparison assesses citizenship theory as it might apply to China, and then assesses a number of measures of rights. First, in order to make comparisons, the very different conceptions and theories of citizenship in China must be considered. Chinese citizenship is based on more of a communitarian model than a liberal or social democratic approach mainly due to Confucianism. Despite considerable improvement in citizenship rights, China’s reliance on a more communitarian citizenship theory (rather than liberal or social democratic theories) tends to emphasize obligations over rights. Second, in assessing the level of rights in China in the 21st century, T. H. Marshall provides the classification of legal, political and social rights. Using Freedom House, Fraser Institute and other data, I make cross-national comparisons between China and Western countries (e.g., the US, Canada and select European countries) and East Asian countries or regions (e.g., Japan, Indonesia, South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan). I also include Russia since it has made a similar transition from communist rule. The paper argues that citizenship rights for Chinese citizens have improved for many legal and social rights but not so much for political rights. However, all of these rights in China are much lower than in the West and much of East Asia, though in a few instances the levels are quite similar to Russia. I conclude with an estimate of the possible pathways toward greater political rights in China over the next few decades.

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Notes

  1. In some ways, Rome might be the better comparison point with China, with the current period somewhat resembling the Roman republic with limited voting rights. Rome resembles Beijing with the dominant capital, and other cities would be of much less importance and a limited bourgeoisie. However, the point of this section is to indicate how citizenship developed in different ways and the medieval period in Europe with itssubsequent cities do a better job of doing this.

  2. However, even the UK as a bastion of democracy did not give up “subjecthood” until into the 20th century, and citizenship only became a strong concept there after World War II with the welfare state under William Beveridge’s guiding ideas and Clement Atlee’s political leadership.

  3. In the House of Ru, one could see the possible reasoning for much higher educational expenditures in China. However, this is pure speculation.

  4. Zhonghua Guo ([27–29]) describes the origins of the Chinese words for citizenship. Guomin which emerged in the late 1800s means nationals or people of the nation with more of an emphasis on subjecthood. Gongmin is the closest to the Western concept of citizenship. Gongminquan means rights of citizens and shimin is sometimes used for citizens as townspeople but it is less formal [39].

  5. An extensive discussion of methodology is beyond the scope of this paper, but a few comments may be useful. Freedom House in the US and the Fraser Institute in Canada measure country rights by the use of country experts or correspondents. Their results are then reviewed by committees who know something about the country in question. The scales for rights may vary and sometimes a higher number may be more rights or more rights violations, so one has to be careful in interpreting them. While each group professes to not have a cultural bias, there is a relative bias against the size of the state and the use of state policies to protect citizens. In table A1 in the appendix, this is evident in that large governments and interventions in the labor force lead to fewer rights. As such, social rights as envisaged by Marshall, Turner and Janoski are negative rights rather than positive ones. This has to do with the liberal economist Milton Friedman being influential in the development of rights indexes for these two world-wide and quite massive attempts to measure rights. This does not invalidate the measures, but one needs to know about this relative bias. Their websites contain much more detail on methodology.

  6. After the great leap forward in the 1950s and then with the cultural revolution in the 1960s, courts had largely been destroyed. They had to be built anew after Den Xiaoping’s market reforms. But society progressively gained more and more legal venues and processes as the result of market reforms after 1990 ([68]: 161–65).

  7. Special and quite different voting procedures are applied for Taiwanese, Hong Kong & Macau deputies ([26], 176).

  8. Other legal issues involve the situations in Taiwan & Hong Kong, which I do not have time to discuss here (Shiu-Hing Lo, 2010, [67]).

  9. Yu sees three principles of development of democracy focused on the ‘price of democracy’ in terms of what costs citizens might face, the principle of ‘incremental democracy’ that abhors radical means but emphasizes the development of political and social capital, and ‘dynamic stability’ that involves change through gradual improvements that have time to consolidate gains before moving on ([44, 45].

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Acknowledgements

A version of this paper was delivered as the plenary talk at “the Conference of Citizenship in Orientalized Societies” at Sun Yat-Sen University in June of 2013. I appreciate the invitation from Zhonghua Guo (Sun Yat-Sen University) and Professor Engin Isin (The Open University, London). Critical commentary has been provided by Dorothy Sollinger (University of California-Irvine), Haoqun Gong (Minzu University), Sun Pinjin (Shanghai University), Taihui Guo (South China Normal University), Ouyang Jinggen (Heibei Party School), and Yihan Xiong (Fudan University). Additional help has come from Fayin Xu (University of Kentucky).

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Janoski, T. Citizenship in China: a Comparison of Rights with the East and West. J OF CHIN POLIT SCI 19, 365–385 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11366-014-9303-5

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