All God's children got property

A guomin (national [citizen]) is nearly synonymous with a gongmin (citizen) ; and so is a shimin (denizen of a town > burgher > bourgeois). Shimin shehui carries a negative connotation, a hangover from having been the conventional rendering in Chinese of the Hegelian and Marxian category bürgerliche Gesellschaft (bourgeois society). The attribution of shimin values was abusive for many years, having the same connotation as zichanjieji (bourgeois/bourgeoisie) . But that word, to make a short story long, literally means "propertied class."

"It's OK to be the propertied class, cuz all God's children got property." Well, in the case of the peasantry, property rights—whose asset value, though presently very low, is nonetheless non-negative.

In classical citizenship theory, a new form of social contract emerged in the advanced capitalist West which diluted class conflict by giving the working class a "right to hold rights." Initially highly abstract, this right was filled with content in the 19th and 20th centuries with the emergence of the welfare state, warfare using citizen armies, and so on.

Property rights were thus only part of the deal. Access to public goods was critical and remains so in the social democracies. And somewhere in all this are human rights, whch are not contractually based: once you've got them at birth you get to keep them—even if you commit genocide, unfortunately.

I've been chatting about the zone of contact between human rights and citizenship with a colleague here at NUS, Bryan Turner (click on "T" for Turner). It is not free of conflict. There will be more about this in future posts, I hope.