The neoliberal dazibao

Gongminhua wansui! (公民化万岁!) Long live citizenisation!

These are the closing words of a recent article found via Google News search on the word 公民化 .

In Chinese, "citizenisation" is formed by simple concatenation of gongmin (citizen) and hua (transform into). It sounds harsh in English but no worse than most technical words in Chinese.

The article is entitled Siyouhua yu gongminhua [Privatisation and citizenisation]. Here's the final passage (my translation, broken up for readability):

In summary, I am firmly convinced that privatisation is citizenisation, and citizenisation is privatisation in a higher sense. There can be no citizenisation without privatization, it’s the fons et origo from which citizenisation stems; without citizenisation in this sense, it would be impossible for the present historicity of developed societies, whether of East or West, to exist.

Only with citizenisation, as a state of inner privatization rendered external, can the maximum safeguard be given to all the individual persons―who make up the cells of the total population of any society― to own assets and control capital; only then can their capital appreciate and their wealth expand effectively, finally being expressed as assets owned and capital held by the citizenry as a whole. Only then will human society be able to develop together from part to whole to all mankind.

What crime is there in privatization?! Privatization is citizenisation! We are entitled to raise our arms and loudly shout, Long live privatization! Long live citizenisation!

Calling this the neoliberal dazibao is not entirely fanciful...

We'll revisit citizenisation - or at least citizenship - a good deal in future posts. It is clearly a buzzword and thereby, as a signifier, well qualified for the floating life. Theory predicts the existence of dazibaos supporting the following forms of citizenisation: classical liberal, liberal democratic, new left and neoconservative. Finding examples from the search results (see link given previously) is set as an exercise.

The theory of citizenship has been a growth industry in the social sciences over the past 20 years, whose exploration in Chinese studies though much more recent has already yielded the excellent volumes of Fogel and Zarrow, Goldman and Perry, Solinger and others. The literature in Chinese is multiplying as you read this. Have a look for example at the introductory article, entitled "Citizen rights and China's Destiny," in the latest issue of Modern China Studies (in Chinese here).

(A slight caveat: gongmin quanli in this title would normally be rendered not as "citizen rights" but as "civil rights." It's that word civil again, which bedevils the study of "civil society" in China: it's rendered in three main ways: shimin shehui, gongmin shehui, and minjian shehui, all with slightly different shades of meaning. But I find this writer wants to toll the bell of "citizen rights" - see what you think).

This particular article is the editorial for the May 2005 issue, not too long; I'll post a translation soon.

Finally, this is the closing paragraph of a lecture by Qin Hui, social historian and public intellectual (“Qin Hui: lecture on 23 March 2003: China’s peasant problem”, Zhongguo nongcun wenti yanjiu zhongxin, 24 November 2003; see text in Chinese).

Conclusion: China’s peasant problem has many aspects, behind all of which is the problem of the peasant becoming a citizen; even if they don’t become townsmen they are entitled to enjoy townsmen's rights. If our observations of the peasant problem are not understood in terms of enhancing their rights and interests, many things will become problematic