Speaker:   Samantha Vortherms, University of California, Irvine

In Manipulating Authoritarian Citizenship, Samantha Vortherms examines the institutions constructing authoritarian citizenship in the crucial case of China—where internal citizenship regimes control who can and cannot become a local citizen through the household registration system (hukou). She highlights how autocrats use internal citizenship regimes to create particularistic membership in citizenship, creating a model of citizenship outside of the liberal democratic ideal. Vortherms shows how local governments explicitly manipulate local citizenship membership not only to ensure political security and stability, but also, crucially, to advance economic development. This transition from subjecthood to citizenship also allows space for individual agency in the local naturalization decision—whether to change one’s hukou or not—that further creates variation in access to citizenship rights in China.

Samantha Vortherms is an Assistant Professor at University of California, Irvine’s Department of Political Science. She’s also a faculty affiliate at UCI’s Long U.S.-China Institute; Philosophy, Political Science, and Economic program; and a Non-resident Scholar at UC San Diego’s 21st Century China Center. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2017 and was a Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellow in Contemporary Asia at Stanford University’s APARC. From 2014-2016, she was a Visiting Research Fellow at the National School of Development’s China Center for Health Economics Research at Peking University.

This event series is sponsored by the MIT Sustainable Urbanization Lab, the University of British Columbia’s School of Community and Regional Planning, and the Harvard Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies.

Zoom Meeting Link: https://mit.zoom.us/j/97147498753