Propertied Migrants and ‘Citizens of Becoming’ in Urban China
Speaker: HO Cheuk Yuet (Adjunct Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong)
Time: 1:00–2:30 pm, 22 Apr 2016 (Friday)
Venue: Room 401, Humanities Building, New Asia College, CUHK
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In this seminar, I shall discuss the changing meaning of urban citizenship from the vantage point of rural migrants. This is a new generation of “conscious” migrant noncitizens, who are constructing a strong sense of urban belongingness but without considering an urban huji even of relevance and significance to their personhood and pursuit of well-being. Instead, property ownership is pervasively deemed the single most important factor in determining their life chances. Likewise, the majority of rural families now constantly resist and ridicule government effort of nongzhuanfei (conversion of household status from rural to non-rural) as a prelude to depriving them of their rural land interests.
I shall focus on the experiences and discourses of a number of better educated and more affluent rural migrants, who variously aspire and strategize to urbanize or refuse to be urbanized. I shall attempt to illustrate that, being a Chinese urban citizen is no longer necessarily a meaningfully delineated category and status, but itself a dynamic process and paradoxical contestation of subject formation and identity of becoming.
ALL INTERESTED ARE WELCOME!
(A light lunch will be served at 12:30 pm. First come first served.)
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