Understanding citizenship beyond the hukou system: The role of migrant worker NGOs in transformation of citizenship in China.

The literature on citizenship of migrant workers in China has long been dominated by the focus on hukou system-induced inequality in the distribution of citizenship rights. Such focus stems from understanding of citizenship necessarily as a rights-endowed membership in the nation-state. This paper argues that in order to fully account for both construction and transformation of citizenship in China, we should extend our understanding of citizenship beyond legalism. The instances where internal migrants gain a new sense of being citizens through civic activism performed by NGOs they set up, despite the hukou-system-defined limitations to their citizenship status, cannot be sufficiently accounted for in the traditional framework of citizenship theories. This study employs a critical theoretical framework of ‘acts of citizenship’ to account for citizenship as not just defined by the state or bound to status and rights, but also as a process which is equally shaped by actors other than state. This paper presents how migrant workers perform ‘acts of citizenship’ through migrant worker NGOs they set up and how these acts transform not only legal aspect of citizenship, but also the existing practices of citizenship and citizenship discourse in China. The findings emerging from a year-long, in-depth fieldwork presented in this chapter point to a necessity of a new theorization on migrant workers’ citizenship; that of viewing it as a co-constructed phenomenon, and one which goes far beyond the hukou system.