4 - Making Border Politics : State Actors & Security in the Chinese Border Regime

Summary

Abstract

This chapter elaborates how responsibility over immigration and border management is shared among government levels and how they conceptualise and practice ‘security’ and ‘development’ at the border. I depict how border politics are regulated in a decentralised and transnationalised system that emphasises central rule over the immigration system while deliberately allowing leeway for local actors (i.e. local governments and local Public Security Bureaus) to find solutions that are legal, yet, different from standard immigration procedures. The role of local governments as ‘scalar managers’ both within the security field of border control and within domestic development campaigns is discussed.

Keywords: Yunnan, Jilin, border security, security field, periphery, Development

To effectively control cross-border travel, the Chinese government establishes rules and regulations. In the last chapter, I showed how the border regime differentiates between wanted and unwanted mobility, creating a social hierarchy of desirability for immigrants of various backgrounds. This chapter probes the government apparatus that constitutes the institutional and bureaucratic infrastructure enforcing these rules. While the security apparatus aims to punish irregular mobility, the immigration system carefully utilizes technologies of biopolitical control to allow limited circulation and movement. These ambiguous practices ultimately spatialize the power relations between centre and periphery and between government and subjects. The border lockdown that followed the COVID-19 outbreak at the beginning of 2020 provides a crucial illustration. The swift and effective lockdown of specific border areas built on the already dense network of the border security apparatus. The lockdown only constituted a further manifestation of the overall surveillance state, allowing immigrants (including returning Overseas Chinese) to be labelled a local health threat and thus mandatorily quarantined. In the north-eastern city of Suifenhe, Heilongjiang Province, infection numbers spiked after Chinese citizens returned from Russia, resulting in a local and border lockdown in early April (BBC News 2020). Around the same time, Chinese citizens living in Myanmar tried to travel back to Yunnan despite the local border lockdown established on March 31 (National Health Commission 2020). According to an article by China's government-supported Global Times, because the border city of Lincang was a destination for returning Chinese, a local lockdown had to be instituted in early April (Global Times 2020).