This paper analyzes how East Asian states have regulated membership and migration through meso-level institutions. Specifically, we examine how states have used the household registration system (China’s hukou system, South Korea’s hoju/hojeok system, and Japan’s koseki system) in the process of nation-state building in the early post-World War Two period, as a security measure to control movement throughout the Cold War, and as a tool to build or sever trans-border kinship ties in the contemporary era. Drawing on the literature on multi-level citizenship, the article contributes to the growing scholarship that unpacks the civic-ethnic divide in comparative citizenship studies by examining how meso-level institutions shape national-level membership in countries that are commonly characterized as having ‘ethnic’ citizenship regimes.
CITATION STYLE
Chung, E. A., Draudt, D., & Tian, Y. (2020). Regulating membership and movement at the meso-level: citizen-making and the household registration system in East Asia. Citizenship Studies, 24(1), 76–92. https://doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2019.1700914
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