Locating Citizenship

In its common sense meaning, the word citizenship evokes passports and borders, manifestations of belonging to a particular state, linking membership to a set of entitlements that flow from inclusion in a national political community. Citizenship studies addresses these linkages from many different perspectives, with a central concern being tensions between formal equality and the persistence of substantive inequality, often associated with informal distinctions in civil society that condition citizens' exercise of rights.Footnote ⁹ This literature also shows how the citizenship order itself legitimates certain forms of inequality among citizens.Footnote ¹⁰

The assumption has generally been that the membership that matters for citizenship is where people are “full members of a community,”Footnote ¹¹ and that citizenship and the nation-state are coterminous.Footnote ¹² National institutions – legal systems, parliaments and social welfare bureaucracies – create a framework through which the civil, political and social rights of citizens may be realized.Footnote ¹³ The fact that rules and institutions associated with formal citizenship exist not only on a national scale but also at other levels of governance has often been overlooked.Footnote ¹⁴ In a prosaic sense, accessing entitlements and participating as a citizen often depends on establishing residence in a particular place, on the jus domicilii (the right of residence), a relatively neglected aspect of citizenship.Footnote ¹⁵ The drawing of electoral boundaries, often a power of local governments, is an obvious example. While such rules may result in exclusion, in some cases they grant citizenship entitlements to non-citizens.Footnote ¹⁶

A geographical and socio-legal perspective on citizenship raises productive questions. At what scale are the institutions that matter for citizenship located? How do these scalar locations affect how citizens participate and claim their entitlements? And, most crucially for this article, how do these scalar logics shape the interaction between formal citizenship entitlements and informal modes of differentiation among citizens? It is these interactions that form an actual citizenship order: “space [is] the machine” in forming the relations of power and inequality among groups within social fields.Footnote ¹⁷ State technologies, such as law and jurisdiction, set the rules of the game at a variety of scales.Footnote ¹⁸ In order to answer such questions, this article combines an ethnographic focus on citizenship as a set of situated practices with attention to formal socio-legal and institutional frameworks.

Although studies of citizenship in China have often highlighted extreme differences in entitlements, particularly the discriminatory effects of the hukou on rural-to-urban migrants, they generally project an urban/rural binary across the territory of the People's Republic of China (PRC). As Li Zhang writes, “[U]rban citizenship in socialist China is the site of an enduring spatial politics whose terms have been set by the hukou system, which divides national space into two hierarchically ordered parts: the city and the countryside.”Footnote ¹⁹ In Dorothy Solinger's seminal work, a fundamental division in China between “agricultural” (nongye 农业, rural) and “non-agricultural” (feinongye 非农业, urban) hukou categoriesFootnote ²⁰ results in urban residents enjoying “full” citizenship based on their access to public goods (such as housing and education), while rural-to-urban migrants are “denied genuine membership.”Footnote ²¹

Recently, a more complex picture of “differential citizenship” incorporates two additional elements: distinctions between officials and ordinary people, and between natives and non-natives of a particular place.Footnote ²² Divergent social provision among localities shows that divisions between insiders and outsiders have replaced the urban/rural divide as the organizing logic of citizenship.Footnote ²³ A particular variant of this pattern is how rich villages exclude migrants from other rural places, a pattern Alan and Josephine Smart call “local citizenship.”Footnote ²⁴

Focusing on the spatial dynamics of this differentiation, my approach shows that although rules relating to citizenship are made at various scalar levels, small-scale localities determine what these rules mean in practice through both formal and informal mechanisms. These jurisdictional moves enable a means of connecting citizens and the state in contemporary China that I term “socialized governance.” This form of rule operates through two principal modes: first, it relies on establishing and maintaining affective connections (guanxi 关系) between local citizens and state agents, with familial metaphors such as “big family” frequently deployed in generating such a sense of connection; and second, in working through these personal ties, it blurs formal and informal authority, a style of local rule that draws on historical forms.Footnote ²⁵ This kin-inflected mode of making individuals legible to the state and disciplining them through direct observation and personal affective bonds is a neglected aspect of guanxi, which has more often been seen as an informal means of distributing state resources,Footnote ²⁶ or more recently, as a means by which firms gain unfair advantage over their competitors.Footnote ²⁷ Furthermore, in contrast to the view of guanxi as paradigmatically informal, the concept of socialized governance highlights the institutionalized character and location of these relationships. In addition, it shows how the personal connections involved in socialized governance cut both ways: guanxi can be a means of control but it also affords citizens channels to express grievances and make claims on the state.

Socialized governance is an ideal that is not always realized in practice. A significant minority of citizens have left their places of hukou registration, or escaped such governance by retreating into private spaces created by marketization.Footnote ²⁸ Yet, there is much to be learned from concentrating on the terms of “normal” or “hegemonic” forms of citizenship, as I do here, rather than starting from the experience of the excluded.Footnote ²⁹ Thus, I begin from institutions that are central to governing citizens in place, the residents and villager committees.

Sites of Citizenship

Local collective units have been central to the integration of Chinese citizens into state projects since 1949. Despite changes in nomenclature, there is significant continuity in the conception of these units' role as self-sufficient entities that should provide for most of the needs of their members. David Bray's study of the origins of the post-1949 work unit (danwei 单位) traces this autarky back to practices in the pre-revolutionary communist base areas.Footnote ³⁰ The norm of collective self-sufficiency combined with the ranking of institutions – from industries, schools and hospitals, to cities and communes – to produce localized sets of entitlements. In rural areas, following collectivization in the 1950s, there was redistribution within units but not between them.Footnote ³¹ By the Cultural Revolution decade (1966–1976), preliminary moves towards centralized welfare systems even in urban areas had been abandoned, and since the 1980s, decentralization has increased local welfare autarky.Footnote ³²

The current manifestations of collective units are the villager committees (cunmin weiyuanhui 村民委员会), in areas designated as rural, and resident committees (jumin weiyuanhui 居民委员会)Footnote ³³ in urban places, both called “basic level” (jiceng 基层) organizations in the Chinese constitution. Conceptualized as self-governing, they are elected by their constituents and are responsible for managing “public affairs and social services.”Footnote ³⁴ Although not considered part of formal government, they play a key role in implementing state policies. Their leadership is drawn from local residents and villagers, but they work closely with the lowest level of formal government, urban street offices and rural townships.

While resident committees have existed since the 1950s, providing employment and services for the minority of urbanites left outside the work unit system, villager committees were first set up in the late 1970s, replacing rural entities called production brigades that had usually been the lowest level of accounting. In the 1982 Constitution, these two types of institutions were made parallel, and their role was strengthened in subsequent legislation and policymaking. Despite their coupling in the Constitution, the two types of committees are rarely compared.Footnote ³⁵ Their importance increased following the dissolution of the communes in the countryside in the early 1980s and of large numbers of work units in the cities from the 1990s onwards. Officially seen as the successors to the collective units of the past, since the late 1990s, resident and villager committees have been given a new role as “communities” (shequ 社区).Footnote ³⁶

Between October 2008 and August 2009, I conducted participant observation in two resident committees and two villager committees in Tianjin municipality, visiting their offices daily for sustained periods. The resident committees, “Progress” and “Rising China,”Footnote ³⁷ both considered model units, are located in central urban districts, Hexi 河西 and Nankai 南开.Footnote ³⁸ I spent about two and a half months visiting each. Rising China's territory incorporates residential and business areas, with two enclosed compounds housing academic and non-academic staff of a major university at its core. It has over 1,200 households, with close to 4,000 people. Progress is composed of three residential compounds, with just over 1,000 households and a total population of around 3,500. The main section of this committee's territory is a large compound of 1950s and 1980s-vintage apartment buildings, but the neighbourhood also incorporates one of the city's first gated commercial housing compounds.

“Zhang Family Village,” one villager committee, is in a rapidly urbanizing suburb in Beichen district 北辰区. I spent two months observing there. More than half of the village land was expropriated by the city in the 1990s, and by the time of my fieldwork, two-thirds of the 4,000-plus villagers had non-agricultural hukou and none made a living from farming. The village collective had successful businesses leasing commercial and industrial buildings. The second villager committee is in “Dragon Peak Village,” a weekend holiday destination for urbanites from Tianjin and Beijing in mountainous Jixian county 蓟县. I lived in the village during the five weeks of my fieldwork there. With only about 250 villagers, its economy is dominated by the tourism business, with some 85 per cent of families running “farmer guesthouses.”

Inevitably, localities have a distinctive character, but this is strengthened by regulatory and governance frameworks. Although the architecture for the committees is set nationally, the most authoritative regulations governing their operations are local; divergences from national laws can include additional specifications and omission of key provisions. For example, national law requires that villager committees be supervised by a villager assembly but Tianjin specifies that a villager representative assembly constituted by elections exercises these functions. Regulations could be even more local: Zhang Family Village had its own rules on eligibility for the generous benefits provided to villagers with funds from collective businesses.

The institutional genealogy of the committees, as expressed in official discourses and popular perceptions, links them to the collectives of the past. Labour officials in Tianjin described resident committees as successors to work units, while committee workers and leaders imagined the work unit as an ideal to emulate. This is not just nostalgia: work units in the form of government agencies, universities and research institutions and state-owned enterprises still employ a significant minority of privileged urbanites. Despite changing nomenclature, villager committees also reflect significant institutional continuity: in both field sites villagers referred to the committees by their earlier name, “the brigade.”

Socialized governance is apparent in both the form and practice of these institutions: they are intermediaries between the state and the people. Their “autonomous” (zizhi 自治) designation situates them outside the formal state, yet they are mandated by the constitution and laws. Work units were effectively autonomous but were designated as state-owned. By contrast, resident committees further distance the formal state from daily life, with their workers no longer “cadres” (ganbu 干部) and in the process of becoming “social workers” (shegong 社工). The idea of villager committee autonomy relates more to the organization of the economic sphere, and their officials are still called cadres. Despite their variable “stateness,” leaders and activists in both types of committees drew on the state's symbolic capital to legitimate their work.

Committee workers are middle people, “double agents,” in that they are both state representatives and neighbours, cadres and kinfolk. All the villager committee workers in my field sites were villagers, and the majority of resident committee staff lived in the neighbourhoods where they worked. Each worker was responsible for a territorial “beat” in which they were expected to maintain contact with residents. They engaged their ambivalent status in their daily work, which often involved visits to people's homes, blurring expressions of neighbourly concern and emotion management with administrative business and information gathering. Yet, committee workers are not only on the side of the state; they share in defining the meaning of citizenship in the places where they live and work.

Belonging: Beyond Hukou

Under the hukou system, each person in China is allocated to a specific administrative territory, usually served by a resident or villager committee. Belonging in my field sites was both a government-ascribed status and a local cultural achievement, with formal membership refracted through traditional notions of place-based identity. The micro-level location of these institutions made cultures of place, developed through moral and political processes of collective sense making, crucial in setting the terms of local citizenship.

Resident and villager committees are the location where people cannot be turned away, where they can legitimately exercise their limited political rights and where the claims for support of people facing the threat of indigence should be dealt with. Membership is historical, concerning personal biography and relationships and the history and cultures of places, reinforced by a degree of stability in places of residence. Despite the massive migration that has occurred over the last two decades across China, the majority of the population in my field sites had remained in place or moved short distances.Footnote ³⁹ This is partly a feature of the state-dominated character of Tianjin's economy.Footnote ⁴⁰ The rise of a housing market in the last decade is certainly changing these patterns.

Local institutions determine how the hukou system works. While national regulations outline the hukou framework, localities make their own rules on its specific operation.Footnote ⁴¹ In major cities such as Tianjin, these local rules have similarities to immigration regulations in the global north. For example, Tianjin allows people who have paid a certain amount of tax in previous years to transfer the hukou of themselves and their family members into the city. One of the hukou “reforms” of recent years has been to grant municipalities formal power to decide such questions.Footnote ⁴²

Maintaining the hukou register is the responsibility of urban and rural police stations (paichusuo 派出所), but resident and villager committees often make citizens legible to them and other authorities: the police could not maintain reliable records without their assistance. Tianjin regulations require “certifications” (zhengming 证明) from the committees for administrative business such as registering the birth or adoption of a child, and moving the hukou location of a spouse or an elderly parent.Footnote ⁴³ In my field sites, certifications were often needed for claims on state resources, particularly to address discrepancies in documents. If you are recognized as a resident, obtaining a certification can be easy, even if the issue in question is technically beyond the committee's jurisdiction. In contrast, the committee's non-cooperation can make dealing with even minor problems impossible.

The two villager committees had a certain degree of discretion about who to include in formal terms, determining who was a “villager” without reference to the hukou system. In Zhang Family Village, this status was in demand owing to the generous welfare benefits paid for from collective funds, and the committee was concerned about the growth in the numbers claiming villager status, particularly women who had married out.

Political citizenship in villages was more exclusive than in urban areas;Footnote ⁴⁴ both the villages I studied did not allow outsiders to vote or become villagers, even if their hukou was registered there. A woman from another part of Tianjin who ran an employment and rental agency in Zhang Family Village and had lived there for 10 years looked incredulous when I asked whether she could get villager status. By contrast, both the resident committees allowed people who had been resident for a year or more to vote in their elections, as the task of keeping track of the resident population provided an incentive for the inclusion of some outsiders.

Yet the binary of inclusion/exclusion was generally not the most important measure of what citizenship meant in each place. The parameters for substantive inequality operated largely within the social field of the committee's territory, and involved hierarchies of relative virtue or superiority among residents or villagers.Footnote ⁴⁵ A collective ethos shaped the conditions of possibility for making claims and engaging in local politics. Such processes were visible in how each committee's organization of space and deployment of rationalities of governance conditioned the livelihoods of residents and villagers at the margins of the globalized economy.

In managing Zhang Family Village's urbanization, its elite promoted certain ideals of modern urban living. Their redevelopment plans did not include compensation for most of the household-based small businesses through which many villagers actually earned their living. The village's successful collective enterprises were capital intensive but employed only a small minority of villagers in low-end jobs. Despite its ostensible role in representing all villagers, the committee's ideals prioritized the needs of some villagers, favouring those who pursue higher education, for example. Its economic decisions benefitted the families who had already amassed significant economic, social and cultural capital.

Despite formal citizenship equality among villagers in both rural sites, rationalities of governance – notably a teleological conception of “progress” from a “backward” rural towards “advanced” urban life that privileges certain forms of economy and cultural capital – legitimated inequalities among villagers. Not all forms of economic capital accumulation were equal; cultural capital adhered to endeavours associated with urban globalized modernity and national projects. The ruling elite led the charge to make the villages amenable to the accumulation of economic capital, and their leaderships' deployment of political labels to denigrate their critics – called “reactionaries” in Zhang Family Village, purveyors of “backward thinking” in Dragon Peak – pointed to political struggles within each village over the distribution of benefits from “development.”

Resident committees had few resources but their regulation of space could significantly affect those pursuing marginal livelihoods. In Rising China, in the name of keeping the main compound “clean,” there were attempts to make invisible the relative poverty of households who collect recyclables for their livelihoods. No such environmental protection logic was applied to limit the growing number of cars or clear out piles of bagged construction waste from apartment renovations that clogged the narrow lanes. This is not to say the area was anti-business: the 400-plus businesses in this committee's territory were situated in a large commercial building and in several street-level blocks, but these were outside the residential compounds. Running a business thus required ownership or rental of a dedicated space.

In the main residential compound of Progress, by contrast, under the rubric of “services convenient to the people,” micro-enterprises proliferated. Residents of this area were a heterogeneous group and not dominated by any single work unit or social class, and included a core of elderly activists who had lived in the neighbourhood for 30 years or more and who favoured socialist rhetoric. The gates of the main Progress compound were open during the day so tradespeople and hawkers could go in and out. Many small businesses operated out of first floor apartments, including a clinic, a textbook store, a marriage introduction agency, several shops selling cooked food, one selling alcohol and cigarettes, and a dental office. Such businesses made use of the one asset most middle-aged or older working-class people had: an apartment.

The differing physical and cultural environments of these resident committees thus provided variable opportunities for residents without regular work to engage in income-generating activities, with the open gates of the main compound in Progress making it a more viable space for such ventures. By contrast, Rising China's closed compound privileged the supposed preference of the emerging middle class for an “orderly” environment that excluded small businesses. Here, divisions between impoverished residents (and outsiders) and those in formal employment were emphasized through distinctions of “quality” (suzhi 素质).Footnote ⁴⁶ These distinctions were less to do with differences in formal institutional arrangements but rather resulted from the social norms that circulated within and around these institutions and which were also evident in the differing perceptions of welfare recipients in the two places.

Reliance on a “Guarantee”

Resident and villager committees are the location of the social safety net of last resort, a key aspect of social citizenship. Reflecting a history of decentralized provision, both rule making and administration of welfare are set at a localized scale, contributing to a pattern of distinctively different welfare regimes across the country. Yet, institutional similarities are also apparent: welfare provision depends on citizen needs made legible through socialized governance; and relative equality in provision of state-sponsored or collective welfare within these units is usually the norm.Footnote ⁴⁷

Rather than being framed in terms of social rights, entitlement to local welfare was expressed through what I call the “guarantee” (baozhang 保障), which gives people facing indigence a claim to some level of assistance from the collective institution to which they belong.Footnote ⁴⁸ Resident and villager committees are the main institutional location for non-employment welfare programmes, including certifying residents' eligibility for age and disability benefits. As a street office official put it, the government has given resident committees the task of ensuring that no one gets into terrible difficulty owing to circumstances such as illness, unemployment or disability. Likewise, villages have an obligation to support villagers who become destitute through assistance from collective funds under the older “five guarantees” (wubao 五保) or newer welfare systems that mean applying for benefits from the county level. The entry of the state as an actor in rural welfare is recent, and in the villages people's sense of entitlement was directed at the collective. If the villager committee couldn't help you, there was nowhere else to go. In the urban sites, claims could be made to various institutions, including the committees and people's former work units.

Rules for welfare provision are set at the local level, where broad national frameworks become specific policy measures. Although when under the leadership of Hu Jintao 胡锦涛 and Wen Jiabao 温家宝 (2002–2012) the central government launched a number of new welfare initiatives such as the Rural Cooperative Medical Scheme, these have been implemented through the same local institutions as in the past. An example is the operation of the Minimum Livelihood Guarantee (zuidi shenghuo baozhang 最低生活保障), the major welfare programme for the poor. National regulations establish a broad “right” for all urban residents whose income is below a certain locally set minimum to receive this cash benefit.Footnote ⁴⁹ In Tianjin, the municipal regulations qualify this right, limiting the benefit to permanent hukou holders and defining eligibility in terms of three lacks: income, capacity to work and family support.Footnote ⁵⁰ In practice, the main criterion for urban eligibility in Tianjin was that the person had “lost the ability to labour” (sangshi laodong nengli 丧失劳动能力) owing to sickness, disability or age. In the resident committees, this assessment was based on assumptions about people's chances in the labour market relating to age, gender and disability. For rural areas, the eligibility criteria were less clear, but family status was more important. In Dragon Peak Village, all the applications for the benefit involved older men who had not married or who had no surviving family members, and at the time of my field work, only one household was receiving the benefit. By contrast, in Zhang Family Village, the benefit was being used to make up for the lack of an employment-based safety net, as many people had lost their farmland but had no regular source of income. Zhang Family Village thus had the highest proportion of guarantee recipients of any of the committees I studied.

Socialized governance was central to determining who got the benefit: through their “beat” work, committee staff were expected to identify eligible people, and to initiate applications, checking that all the necessary documentation was provided and reflected the person's actual situation. Local social norms shaped people's sense of entitlement in distinctive ways: in socialist Progress, there did not appear to be any stigma attached to receiving welfare, whereas in Rising China being a benefit recipient was seen as a mark of distinctions in “quality” that naturalized the unequal outcomes of people's struggles to manage in the new economy. When I arrived in Dragon Peak Village, I was told by one of the leaders, “we have no welfare here.” Here, too, people's inability to provide for their own security through the tourism economy was a mark of “low quality.” Such distinctions were less apparent in Zhang Family Village where the majority of villagers were affected by the urbanization process.

Despite the role of the committees in determining which applications could go forward, final decisions on the minimum livelihood guarantee were made at the county or district level. From the perspective of the committee workers, these decisions often appeared arbitrary. Local discretion in rule making and approving benefit claims reflects the fact that a significant proportion of spending on welfare comes from city districts or rural counties, while the overwhelming majority of funds for this purpose come from the provincial level or below.Footnote ⁵¹ In urban Tianjin, 50 per cent of funds for the minimum livelihood guarantee came from the municipality, and 50 per cent from the district level; and in rural Tianjin, all the funds for this benefit had to come from the county, township or district level, including a proportion from the village itself.Footnote ⁵² In Zhang Family Village, the villager committee had to pay 10 per cent of the benefit and Beichen district covered the remaining 90 per cent. This was one of a number of significant differences in welfare policy and practice among localities within Tianjin municipality, distinctions that, like the salience of “quality” discourses, did not only map onto the rural/urban divide.

Belonging was a crucial determining factor in eligibility for any welfare in all committees. You could only go to the place where you belonged to make a claim for benefits, even if you now lived somewhere else. Local rules in Tianjin exclude migrants from non-employment welfare, as is often the case.Footnote ⁵³ In Zhang Family Village, the 8,000-plus “outsiders” in the area were not eligible for any of the benefits administered by the villager committee. These sojourners were only of interest to the committee because the township had made it responsible for ensuring that migrants complied with birth planning policies.

The Dragon Peak villager committee paid almost no attention to the hundreds of workers from nearby villages doing construction or working in the guesthouses. I was told by the foreman of the work crew building an artificial white-water rafting feature right outside the committee headquarters that there was no accident insurance for these workers. This was a “private” project, contracted by the village Party secretary's family. The foreman had told the labourers before starting work that if they had a minor accident, he would pay for their treatment, but if it was major, they would be on their own. Since they did not belong, they had no recourse to challenge such an arbitrary (and possibly illegal) arrangement.

Local Participation, Local Voice

The political role of resident and villager committees is manifested in their mandate to deal with complaints and act as a mechanism for input on local matters. Insofar as there is a legitimate sphere for political participation, it is at the level of these committees, as they are the channel through which people may exercise their constitutional right to complain.Footnote ⁵⁴ Relative tolerance at this level gives citizens a degree of voice in asserting entitlements to social welfare and in shaping community norms. Active participation in state projects has been integral to PRC citizenship, and the boundaries between work and political engagement often blurred in the collectives of the past, so the concept of participation (canyu 参与) retains broader connotations than in the narrowly political meaning generally used in citizenship studies.

Another manifestation of this political role are elections at this level, the most direct form of electoral participation available to people in the PRC today.Footnote ⁵⁵ In principle, all resident and villager committees should be elected, and voting for members of district or county-level people's congresses is conducted through polling in the committees. While rules on elections broadly model the prescriptions of national laws, localities have significant discretion on when and how to apply these laws. One example is the rules on villager representative assemblies, mentioned above; another is that although the 1990 Organic Law on Urban Resident Committees stated that these should be constituted through elections, Tianjin did not start such polling until 2000, and only enacted regulations for them in 2002. In practice, the regulations issued at street office-level seemed to be the most authoritative for the actual conduct of the polls.

All four of the elections in the committees I studied in Tianjin had little to do with choosing between different candidates or policy platforms; direct elections are not necessarily competitive.Footnote ⁵⁶ However, socialized governance was crucial to achieving the main goal: levels of participation that legitimized the process and the leaders duly elected. The network of activists mobilized to achieve these results also serves as a channel to constituents, including identifying people/households in need of the kinds of assistance or intervention described in the previous section. Election rituals strengthened relationships among these local activists and the “leaders” who were eventually elected.

Concerns and criticisms had to be raised through these informal channels; elections were not a platform for discussions of local affairs or grievances. A manual for resident committee workers in Hexi district stated that they had to seek to resolve all complaints raised, even if these were outside their jurisdiction. Committee members are expected to bring their constituents' concerns to officials; they thus act as gatekeepers for input to the state from below, reminiscent of the “mass-line politics” of the past.Footnote ⁵⁷

By contrast, taking a complaint outside the committee's territory is often seen as a serious problem, even if it is only to the local street office. A disabled man who pressed his case for his own housing by staging silent sit-ins at the street office responsible for Progress caused consternation, and committee workers put significant effort into persuading him to stop. The central state makes its preference for resolving complaints locally abundantly clear, both by penalizing local officials who do not forestall collective complaints from reaching higher levels of government and by unofficially punishing repeat petitioners.Footnote ⁵⁸

While neither the elections nor the channels for complaints provided space for open debate on public affairs, as spaces of local sociality committees could become a site for a critical politics of gossip and talk about local leaders and policies. Given the severe constraints on expression in the recent past, the kind of local voice this involved was an important resource. This politics of gossip and talk could have real effect, particularly when the speakers were older people with established authority. Damaging the good reputation of an authority figure was a principal method of critique, with an example being rumours about local leaders circulating in Zhang Family Village during a dispute over election fraud there.

The four places provided distinctly different spaces for political talk. Those who went into the Zhang Family villager committee office with business to conduct often asked about the status of the stalled elections, and lively discussions usually ensued. The two resident committees provided opportunities for informal gatherings and organized social events, such as dances and computer classes, but their distinctive political cultures generated different styles of political talk. Discussions about growing social inequality and complaints about the common people being left out of the benefits of reform, comparing the present unfavourably to the past, often erupted out of conversations at the Progress office, reflecting the neighbourhood's strong socialist identity, but such grousing was largely absent in Rising China.

Even the most loyal of the activists and resident and villager committee workers could be heard on occasion expressing sharp criticism of the formalism of self-governance. The notion that the elections were merely “going through the motions” (zou xingshi 走形式) became something of an unofficial slogan for the process: I heard exactly the same phrase in relation to all three of the election processes I observed. Their ambivalence showed that committee activists and workers could be simultaneously state agents and disgruntled local citizens. Depending on the circumstances, they could promote social (and state) control but they were also potential organizers of collective resistance.