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In twenty-first-century Chinese cities there are hundreds of millions of rural migrants who are living temporary lives, suspended between urban and rural China. They are the unsung heroes of the country’s ‘economic miracle’, yet are regarded as second-class citizens in both a cultural, material and legal sense. China’s citizenship challenge tells the story of how civic organisations set up by some of these rural migrants challenge this citizenship marginalisation. The book argues that in order to effectively address the problems faced by migrant workers, these NGOs must undertake ‘citizenship challenge’: the transformation of migrant workers’ social and political participation in public life, the broadening of their access to labour and other rights, and the reinvention of their relationship to the city. By framing the NGOs’ activism in terms of citizenship rather than class struggle, this book offers a valuable contribution to the field of labour movement studies in China. The monograph also proves exceptionally timely in the context of the state’s repression of these organisations in recent years, which, as the book explores, was largely driven by their citizenship-altering activism.
local government and ACFTU, and in this way seeks to change attitudes towards NGOs and towards greater empowerment of migrant workers, attempting to transform citizenship rights from within the system. One such essential part of the process of claiming representation is by self-organisation of workers through collective bargaining. Collective bargaining is conducted by several Guangdong-based, so-called ‘labour movement type’ NGOs. In the sample of NGOs in this study, those who helped workers in collective bargaining were FJ, UA and ET
. In surrogacy, parenthood claims are ridden by ethical complexities, and so is the citizenship claim of the child born to the surrogate woman in the host country and later taken by foreign commissioning parents to their home country. Different legal regimes across various cultures and countries recognise different actors in surrogacy as the bearer of citizenship rights; citizenship can thus
their positioning rooted in a given physical or geographical space, in a certain kind of community or social arrangement, determine the construction of their citizenship identities and their access to resources, opportunities and entitlements. Needless to say, when citizenship rights and entitlements are inhibited, withheld or violated, there is a heightening of pauperization and marginalization. This is where governance comes in. Ideally, governance should be concerned with the restoration of citizenship rights equally and equitably. That would mean, in turn
be identified: Democracy as a system of government. Here we can discern two forms of democracy: ‘defensive democracy’ and ‘citizen democracy’/‘republican democracy’; democracy and legitimising government; majority rule and democracy; equality of citizenship rights; public opinion in democracies; the rule of law and democracy. Democracy as a system of government Ancient Greeks, such as Aristotle in
Friday Agreement were reopened by the possibility of Brexit (McTague 2018 ). Another challenge that is sharpened by Brexit relates to the need for some degree of harmonization or Europeanization of the citizenship laws of the member states. Increased cross-border migration and family formation leads to functional pressures for basing access to citizenship rights on residence rather than nationality, and the introduction and growth of EU citizenship has profoundly altered the nature of Europe and the meaning of European integration for its citizens, which forces even
THIS CHAPTER EXPLORES, through a discussion of one instance, how the principal categories of the Lockean narrative can shape the context for the understanding of and response to political injury. In the case of much Western response to the Beijing massacre the conceptualisation of man and the state is particularly important, as is the related articulation of the realms of ethics and politics. The following discussion of the Beijing killings also questions the adequacy of the terms of the debate between citizenship rights and human rights
This chapter explores the ways in which voluntary women’s organisations focussed on the concept of citizenship rights and sought to secure the social and civil rights of citizenship for women. Here the focus is on divorce law reform, access to birth control information and the campaign to introduce safe and legal abortion. The diverging views of each organisation with regard to these moral questions are discussed. The difficulties encountered by organisations seeking to enhance women’s lives whilst at the same time defending their moral and religious beliefs is a central theme of this chapter.
Recent debates over migration, refuge, and citizenship are challenging the assumed primacy of the nation-state as the key guarantor of rights and entitlements. Sanctuary Cities and Urban Struggles makes the first sustained intervention into exploring how such considerations of citizenship, rights, and mobility are recast when examined from different spatial scales. The collection brings together discussions from across political geography, urban geography, citizenship studies, socio-legal studies, and refugee studies to explore the role of urban social movements, localised practices of belonging and rights claiming, and diverse articulations of sanctuary in reshaping where and how responses to the governance of migration are articulated. Working from the intimate relations of the body and interpersonal accounts of sanctuary, through to strategies for autonomous settlement as part of Europe’s ‘summer of migration’, the collection sets out to challenge the often assumed primacy of the nation-state as the dominant lens through which to understand questions of citizenship and mobility. In its place, Sanctuary Cities and Urban Struggles proposes not a singular alternative, but rather a set of interlocking sites and scales of political practice and imagination, all of which respond to, and variously rework, the governmental demands of the contemporary nation-state. Mixing empirical cases and conceptualisations that move beyond ‘seeing like a state’, this collection will be of interest to geographers, political sociologists, migration scholars, social anthropologists, and urbanists.
‘The Trust will pursue debt through all means necessary.’ This is part of a response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOI) request submitted to a London-based National Health Service (NHS) Trust, regarding the cost-recovery programme being used to collect outstanding debts from migrant women who have been charged for maternity and post-natal care in NHS institutions. Since 2015, migrants in England classed as undocumented, failed asylum seekers and overseas visitors, among others, are required to pay for secondary NHS services. The regulations stipulate that the certain migrants charged for care can be reported to the Home Office after two months of non-payment, a measure that directly affects their immigration status and the outcome of future immigration applications. In addition, outstanding debts are often passed on to third-party international debt-collection agencies. Narrating this complex and unfolding extension of the British debt economy to encompass migrant healthcare in Britain, the chapter links the production of indebted migrants to the afterlives of British empire. In so doing, it outlines how the Commonwealth Immigration Acts, which stripped citizenship rights away from colonial British subjects on the basis of race, form the precursor to the aggressive forms of racialized capitalism and immigrant incarceration being brought to bear against migrants in Britain today.