Governmentality, quantification, the digital

The production of digital borders and the development of digital sovereignty have effects that are felt within the bordered digital spaces and outside of them. Digital borders are not just national borders, and the effects of digital borders can be analysed at a multitude of geographical scales, from the regional to the neighbourhood, and from the national territory to the bordered and bounded instant messaging group. The contributions to this special issue reveal the diverse ways in which borders and sovereignty are developed as well as how these processes are contested in ways that call into question pre-existing conceptualisations of digital relations, particularly the understanding of the internet as borderless. (link)

This article examines the technologies of power and subjectification in China’s social credit system through a theoretically informed analysis of policy and legal documents as well as the narratives of social credit practitioners, including local officials and representatives of business partners. The ongoing project is a heterogeneous ensemble of discourses, regulations, policies, and any number of programs aiming to govern social and economic activities through problematizing, assessing, and utilizing the “trustworthiness” of individuals, enterprises, organizations, and government agencies. Drawing on governmentality studies, the article explicates the operation of governmental and disciplinary-pastoral modalities of power in the project, which are interrelated in their logics and overlap in the tactics employed. Whereas the strategy of governmental/biopolitical power is centered on achieving effective economic governance and improving regulatory compliance through technological fixes, disciplinary-pastoral power aspires to shape individual behavior and the collective mores of a locality according to a mixture of market-oriented and socialist-traditional values. Social credit is envisioned to produce and channel homo economicus and homo moralis. However, the relationships between liberal and socialist subjectivities and between rationalization and moralization are by no means coherent. The assemblage of social credit government is characterized by contradictions and contestations. (link)

This chapter examines the genealogy and contemporary configuration of two key concepts that are central to governing the ‘boundary’ and ‘quality’ of citizenship in China: hukou and suzhi. Whereas hukou, or the household registration system, functions as a formal meso-level citizenship that distributes rights and regulates internal migration, the discourse of suzhi, loosely translated as quality, constructs what a desirable citizen subject should look like. These technologies of citizenship are inherently interconnected to one another, as the notion of suzhi—which articulates hierarchized difference and calls for the government of the self – is used in political, academic and everyday discourses to justify the regime of differentiated rights and mobility. Discourses about hukou and suzhi are analyzed in the context of hybrid governmentalities in post-socialist or neo-socialist China. While the emphasis of suzhi on market value and self-improvement is reminiscent of neoliberal citizenship and the liberal subject of improvement, it is best understood as fusing together different rationalities around the government of the self and within the hegemonic modernization discourse in contemporary China. (link)(pdf)

Drawing on insights from critical citizenship studies and governmentality studies, this article explores and theorizes the changing mobility regime in China and its centerpiece, the household registration (hukou) system, from a global comparative perspective. First, we conceptualize the hukou system within the broader problematique of the spatiality of social citizenship and show how it enables processes of boundary-making that are comparable to the policing of the migrant poor in pre-welfare-state Europe and the subordination of international migrant labor in the contemporary world. Second, we argue that the shifting mobility regime envisaged by the current hukou reforms and new urbanization, which moves away from the dualistic structure of inclusion/exclusion to a multiplication of legal statuses and boundaries of citizenship, embodies a neoliberal-authoritarian rationality of government. Engaging with the debate on the hybrid governmentalities of post-socialist China, we focus particularly on new techniques of mobility management in China’s first-tier cities, whose national positioning resembles that of Northern countries in the global hierarchy of power. Through examples of the point-based system and the strategy of functional dispersal, we demonstrate how these globalizing cities actively engineer a highly polarized mobility regime in their pursuit of generating globally competitive spaces. The article contributes to the critique of methodological nationalism by denaturalizing national citizenship as a pre-given point of departure in examining mobility and socio-spatial boundaries. It also offers new insights into the converging trends of neoliberal authoritarianism and authoritarian neoliberalism in governing the ‘glocal’ hierarchies of citizenship and mobility. (link)