Manipulating Authoritarian Citizenship Security, Development, and Local Membership in China

In Manipulating Authoritarian Citizenship, Samantha A. Vortherms examines the crucial case of China-where internal citizenship regimes control who can and cannot become a local citizen through the household registration system (hukou)-and uncovers how autocrats use such institutions to create particularistic membership in citizenship. Vortherms shows how local governments explicitly manipulate local citizenship membership not only to ensure political security and stability, but also, crucially, to advance economic development. Vortherms demonstrates how autocrats use differentiated citizenship to control degrees of access to rights and thus fulfill the authoritarian bargain and balance security and economic incentives. This book expands our understanding of individual-state relations in both autocratic contexts and across a variety of regime types.