Unsettling Encounters: NGOs, Rural Migrants and Moral Citizens in Contemporary China

摘要

This dissertation, based on my 18 months of fieldwork from 2013 to 2014 in Beijing, provides an ethnographic account of Chinese moral citizens and their humanitarian/benevolent endeavors in the form of NGO programs in migrant worker enclaves (chengzhongcun) in urban China. This study argues that moral citizenship has become an indispensable component of the neoliberal project in post-socialist China. As the market reform has widened the social gap, state power has taken new measures to encourage citizens to take on more responsibilities. Based on their ability to give, donate, and care for the disadvantaged, Chinese people are categorized into two groups, those who can afford to give and those who are forced to take. Those who can afford to shoulder more social responsibilities have become the moral citizens who are desirable or even officially praised by the state agencies. Those who are positioned to take are considered lack of abilities, vulnerable and ought to be enhanced. The mutual obligations between these two groups have generated new forms of governance that are not based on coercion but rather on indebtedness. Moreover, this study investigates NGO programs of various kinds, including service programs, chengzhongcun tourism, advocacy programs and resistance. It demonstrates that although moral citizens have hoped to establish solidarity across class lines, what they have really achieved is the exclusive solidarity among middle-class people. Migrant workers' interests and desires are often not represented by these NGOs.