Creating the governable population: authoritarian cultural citizenship and the ethnic minorities in a Sino-Tibetan intercultural area in contemporary China

ABSTRACT

This study interrogates how China’s ethnic minorities in a Sino-Tibetan intercultural area practice their citizenship. We build on the ideas of cultural citizenship and authoritarian citizenship to develop an analytical framework of authoritarian cultural citizenship which highlights the interactive mechanisms between the powerful Chinese state and the resilient ethnic minorities. We identify their traditional cultural citizenship practices in such multi-ethnic, -cultural, and religious site, and further discover their additional authoritarian cultural citizenship practices profoundly affected by the presence of the Chinese state, and lastly explain in length their changes and responses in such practices as the security-driven state effects become intensified.

KEYWORDS:

• Authoritarian citizenship
• cultural citizenship
• contemporary China
• ethnic minorities

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Yunnan University National-Level Project Incubation [2022YNUGSP21]; China Rural Social Survey.