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The citizenship of Chinese–foreign children who have been brought up in China is an area of increasing political relevance because of their growing numbers and public visibility, as well as the high status accorded to children in the political agenda of the Communist Party, and wider debates on Chinese citizenship, identity and belonging. In this article we examine how decisions about children's citizenship are made across national and generational divides in different family contexts in China, namely in Chinese–Vietnamese, Chinese–Russian, Chinese-Ukrainian, and Chinese–Cameroonian families. We tease out contestations between foreign and Chinese parents and grandparents and discuss how gender, socioeconomic, and racial dimensions affect children's citizenship negotiations in these multigenerational households. We argue that the bodies of the Chinese-foreign children occupy a prominent place in the territorialising practices of Chinese citizenship that are shaped by gendered, racial, and socioeconomic inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the life stories of post-Soviet women from Ukraine and Russia who married Chinese citizens and moved their married lives to China, this article examines how these women engage in intimate geopolitics in the adverse immigration environment for foreign family members. The elaborated argument maintains that the women – driven by the uncertainty surrounding their legal and socio-economic status and the fear of forced separation from their children – resort to their home citizenship or informal dual citizenship arrangements as leverage to defend parental rights against the backdrop of China's strict single citizenship regime. The women develop strategies to ensure their parental rights through citizenship structures available to them, and seek to remedy their emotional uncertainties amid the environment of limited and tenuous immigrant and family statuses in China. This paper develops analytical potential of intimate geopolitics through an analysis of post-Soviet wives' subjectivities constituted through the interplay of geopolitical structures and their emotional intensities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marriage migration has developed as a discursive field and a new direction of governing practices in the relations of post-Mao China with Russia and Vietnam. This article examines China's developing governing regime for international marriages from the perspective of its sovereign concerns related to border stability, population management, and national security. These concerns are considered through the analysis of material and affective processes informing and shaping the regulations and representations of marriage migration to China. This discussion not only shows how the Chinese state revises its administrative and legal terms of international marriage, but also highlights the historical, racialized, and gendered forces that shape the process. The regulatory framework of marriage migration is informed by the shifting structures of feeling shaping the contours of belonging in Chinese society. These intersecting spheres of state affective and regulatory practices signal new relations of power and inequality coalescing in China's relations with its neighbors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to the debates on China's socio-political transformations by tracing the link between China's modernization and nationalism, and analysing their mutual interplay. Many recent studies discuss post-Mao China's development as a unique model challenging earlier development approaches. Instead, the argument pursued here points to the dependence of China's dominant development thinking on the paradigm of modernization and its symbolic celebration in official discourse and public rituals. By tracing the impact of the modernization paradigm in the influential annual publication China Modernization Report and in the 2009 National Day mass parade, the article shows how and what kind of Chinese nation is produced. I argue that China's ostensibly unique development model is constrained by the modernization thinking underlying it. Analysis of the discourses on modernity and 'scientific development' and the symbolism associated with them reveals a series of dichotomies and oppositions underpinning China's nation-building. China's pursuit of modernization relies on the suppression of other possible development paths within China and subsumes Chinese development experiences under those of the generalised West, thereby restricting development alternatives to those allowed within a hierarchical view of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines why, how, and with what implications the term “overseas Chinese ethnic minorities” has recently entered the official scholarly discourse and policy discussions on overseas Chinese in the People’s Republic of China. Through examining policy documents, reports, scholarly publications, and interviews with officials and scholars, the article shows that the shaoshu minzu category has permeated the discourse on overseas Chinese to steer the dual efforts of the Chinese authorities to overcome the Han-centricity of overseas Chinese studies in China and to mobilize transnational “ethnic unity” among Han and non-Han overseas Chinese. By way of highlighting a possible response to the government initiatives toward overseas Chinese ethnic minorities, the article also considers a written account of a Kazakh Dungan who took part in a government-sponsored tour to China in search of his “historic roots.” The analysis presented in the article points to a pervasive character of state power directed at totalizing heterogeneous transnational identities and reducing them to fixed categories. These transnational efforts emphasize unity over variety and cohesion over diversity within the Chinese nation. The inherently dichotomous understanding of diversity within the Chinese nation where the Han majority is contrasted to China’s ethnic minorities informs the People’s Republic of China’s transnational nation-building efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including the fairness, individual achievement, and opportunity equality in China, xenophobia, and the rise of international and internal migrant communities in China.

This article examines how China, understood as a construct made up of multiple identities, constantly negotiates its relationships with the world. The oppositions—between tradition and modernity, the past and the present, China and the West— that are often presumed or reproduced in our thinking about China's place in the world are called into question. China's relationship with the world must be understood through the interplay between history and present, and thus through the particular uses of history in practice. The article especially explores how the world and China's place in it are seen in Chinese popular culture and visual expressions of state initiatives to promote Chinese culture. It focuses on the way images of the ever-changing world are depicted in two visual narratives: a promotional video of the Confucius Institute and the film The World (Shijie). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the People's Republic of China's (PRC) continuous state-building project since its establishment in 1949, the notion of nation and nationality (minzu) has been uninterruptedly utilised by the leading elite in its political programmes. The notion of the 'nationality question' (minzu wenti) was employed especially for addressing the issues of the officially identified minority nationalities at the time when the multinational nature of the state was made fundamental. However, how a multinational character of the Chinese state is interpreted by the state elite and how this interpretation is shaped by their policies have arguably changed along with the political and economic preferences of the regime. This paper aims to explore the meaning of 'nationality question' during the period of socialist construction, and traces the shift in its notion during the reform period which started in the 1970s. The essay pays attention to the change in the preferred corresponding English term of minzu wenti. I argue that the substitution of the 'nationality question' term, which was dominant during the socialist period, with the concept of the 'ethnic question' during the reform period points not only to the changing character of the government policies towards minorities, but also legitimises them as the only suitable and rightful in the context of economic reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]