Manipulating Authoritarian Citizenship charts the changes in the household registration (hukou) system in the PRC, with a focus on the past two decades. The book joins important works on the hukou system such as Fei-Ling Wang’s Organizing through Division and Exclusion (Stanford University Press, 2005) and Jeremy Wallace’s Cities and Stability (Oxford University Press, 2014). Whereas Wang’s pathbreaking work established the development and history of the hukou system and Wallace placed Chinese urbanization in comparative perspective, Vortherms highlights the heretofore largely unexplored issue of local variation in hukou policy. Manipulating Authoritarian Citizenship’s research question is why some local governments in China have created relatively open hukou naturalization policies that facilitate inward migration, while other local governments adopted highly restrictive policies that made it essentially impossible for migrants to gain permanent access to local citizenship rights. Vortherms convincingly argues that local government citizenship naturalization policies are driven not only by security concerns (as many existing works have emphasized), but also by economic development strategies. Security motivations give local governments incentives to adopt exclusive policies because migrants are seen as potentially destabilizing and a drain on local revenues. By contrast, economic motivations prompt inclusion (to various degrees) because facilitating the flow of migrants allows local governments to manage labour markets.
The empirical chapters of the book explore variation in hukou policies at the municipal level as well as how Chinese citizens have responded to these policies. The third chapter introduces a naturalization policy index, grouping municipalities into selective, moderate and open categories based upon the ease through which applicants can naturalize their hukou. Chapter four outlines three pathways of hukou naturalization policies. The first, “outward-oriented development,” occurs when municipalities are highly reliant on foreign direct investment (FDI). High inflows of FDI create more open labour markets with higher wages, facilitate technology transfer and create competition across municipalities for high-skilled workers. In response, municipalities create local naturalization regimes that favour high-skilled workers to attract and retain talent. The second pathway, “bottom-up development,” occurs when land-centred urbanization strategies based on local resources form the basis of development. Land takings displace farmers from their land, while agricultural mechanization reduces the demand for farm labour. The ensuing labour surplus in the countryside and the need to drive economic development prompts municipalities to favour widespread inclusion of local migrants. The third pathway, “top-down development,” occurs in poorer municipalities that rely primarily on fiscal transfers from the central government for development. Relative poverty leads municipalities to view expansion of hukou-related benefits as increasing fiscal burdens without attendant economic benefits. Extensions of hukou benefits are rare and occur primarily during poverty resettlement programmes. Chapter five dives down to the individual level to examine the question of who wants to naturalize their hukou through survey experiments in Beijing and Changsha.
A key strength of Manipulating Authoritarian Citizenship is its empirical sources and rigorous mixed methods. Vortherms draws upon 120 interviews with officials at several levels and citizens in multiple provinces conducted from 2012–2019. This is complemented by two original datasets. The first is a dataset of the relative openness of hukou naturalization policies in 2016. Vortherms and her research assistants combed public security bureau websites in all 333 municipalities in China, compiling sufficient data on 327 of them (95 per cent). This dataset figures prominently in chapter four, which is easily the strongest chapter of the book. The second dataset is a survey experiment of the willingness of citizens to naturalize their hukou registration conducted among migrants in Beijing and Changsha. The second standout feature of the book is the extent to which it embeds the Chinese hukou system into the broader literatures on comparative politics and particularly authoritarian politics. Vortherms skilfully links the benefits associated with authoritarian citizenship to theories of authoritarian political survival such as Bueno de Mesquito and Smith’s Logic of Political Survival (MIT Press, 2005). While existing works in this field largely highlight the security imperatives to provide public goods associated with authoritarian citizenship to social groups, Vortherms’s key contribution is demonstrating how economic incentives influence patterns of inclusion. The third key strength of Manipulating Authoritarian Citizenship is its focus on explaining local variation in hukou policies. Vortherms goes far further into establishing the extent and causes of local variations than existing works.
There is much to admire about Manipulating Authoritarian Citizenship and very little to criticize. Two points can be raised. First, the book would have benefitted from fully fleshed-out case studies of municipalities (even if anonymized through pseudonyms) that follow each of the three development strategies as a means of further identifying and providing evidence to support the mechanisms at work. This is especially the case for the “bottom-up” strategy, because the theoretical link between the quantitative measure (agricultural machinery) and hukou naturalization is less well-developed. Second, Vortherms is too hasty in her dismissal of the problem of state coercion in hukou conversions, which typically occurs in conjunction with land takings. Based on a 2014 State Council opinion that proclaims that “the will of both urban and rural residents to independently decide on their settlement shall be respected” (p. 156), she concludes that “all individuals have the right to choose their settlement location” (p. 156). Given the notorious policy implementation problem in Chinese politics, her dismissal of coercion as a pre-2014 problem is unconvincing. The (presumably) continued presence of coercion does not undermine the credibility of her findings on the sources of individual demand for hukou conversions, but it does suggest that the role played by demand is more limited.
Manipulating Authoritarian Citizenship will appeal to scholars of Chinese politics as well as sociology and geography. Vortherms’s prose is engaging and accessible, making the book suitable for upper-level undergraduate or graduate courses. Manipulating Authoritarian Citizenship is the most important and compelling book on the hukou system in the past decade. It will no doubt be widely read and appreciated.
