Location-specific citizenship: state visions of spatial selectivity in the cities of Beijing and Suzhou

This article presents a study of variability in the governance of internal migration in urban China as envisioned in official policy documents launched since 2011. Such policies were meant to promote the making of 100 million Chinese nationals into new local citizens of cities before 2021, thereby conferring upon successful applicants access to public services provided by local governments. By means of adapted concepts of space, spatiality and spatial selectivity, this article offers a preliminary account of variation in policy between municipal authorities in Beijing and Suzhou, using key centrally issued policy documents as a standard. Particularly in the case of Suzhou, the diffusion of central policy form was not always accompanied by the diffusion of central policy function. Local uptake of form but not function was achieved, for instance, by inverting barriers against settlement into enablers of settlement. The study shows the importance of human capital in strategies by which the central state intended to manage the local state, and vice versa, even as they all sought to engage in territorial governance from different positions. In light of these findings, implications for the theorizing of territorial governance and for further research are drawn out.