The unique role of the Chinese government in the protection of overseas citizens

Abstract

How to optimize China’s protective mechanism for overseas citizens has become the top agenda of China’s public administration. A comparison of the evacuation policies of China and the US in the 2010s reveals that the Chinese government’s operations attach more importance to the actual effects of evacuation and the feelings of citizens, while considering the responsibility of citizens and cost burden less. This generous evacuation policy can be partly rationalized by China’s domestic factors, such as the “Going Global” policy, its contemporary image as a populous rising power, and its traditional family-country narrative, which generates a familial conception of state–citizen relations and encourages the government to take extra responsibility for citizens. While the familial conception of state–citizen relations is conductive to building national identity and cohesion, it blurs the dividing line between civic responsibility and governmental responsibility, undercuts the efficiency of public administration, causes waste of public resources, and overburdens governmental agencies. As China’s industrialization and urbanization progress, how to revise the long-established familial conception of state–citizen relations and establish a responsible civil society based on contractual rule of law has become an urgent issue.

Points for practitioners

This study highlights the parental role of the Chinese government in the protection of overseas citizens and attributes it partly to the traditional family-country narrative, which generates a family conception of state–citizen relations. While this conception is conductive to building national identity and cohesion, it causes waste of public resources and overburdens governmental agencies. It is necessary to revise the long-established conception and cultivate a responsible civil society to improve the efficiency of public administration in contemporary China.