The unique role of the Chinese government in the protection of overseas citizens
| Author | Lianlian Liu,Jessica Gammon |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0020852320954278 |
| Published date | 01 September 2022 |
| Date | 01 September 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
The unique role of the
Chinese government
in the protection of
overseas citizens
Lianlian Liu
Peking University, China
Jessica Gammon
Peking University, China
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.
Corresponding author:
Lianlian Liu, Peking University, School of International Studies, Haidian District, Beijing, China.
Email: liulianlian@pku.edu.cn
International Review of Administrative
Sciences
!The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0020852320954278
journals.sagepub.com/home/ras
2022, Vol. 88(3) 793–808
International
Review of
Administrative
Sciences
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.
Keywords
Chinese government, civic responsibility, familial state–citizen relations, government
responsibility, protection of overseas citizens
Introduction
In 2016, Chinese citizens working abroad numbered close to 10 million, 544,500
students were studying overseas (Ministry of Education PRC, 2017), and tourists
traveled internationally 122 million times (China News, 2017). Given this massive
scale of overseas citizens whose safety is threatened from time to time by armed
unrest, criminal offences, and natural disasters in host countries, it has become
increasingly urgent for China to establish effective protective mechanisms for over-
seas nationals (Xinhua.net, 2014). Since it officially proposed protection of over-
seas interests in 2004, the Chinese government has continuously improved its
mechanism for overseas interest protection. Remarkable results have been
achieved, accompanied by problems as well. One of the most pressing issues is
that the Chinese embassies and consulates have become overwhelmed and the
shortage of resources for protecting overseas citizens has become increasingly
prominent (Xia, 2016: 10).
China urgently needs to improve its mechanism for the protection of overseas
citizens to meet actual needs. Given that the US has rich experience in protecting
overseas interests and that a country’s evacuation policy best reflects its philosophy
of the protection of overseas citizens, it is a feasible approach to examine the merits
and weaknesses of China’s existing protective mechanism for overseas citizens by
comparing its evacuation operations with those of the US. This article seeks to:
characterize China’s overseas citizen protection policy by comparing its evacuation
operations with those of the US in several typical cases in the 2010s (i.e. the 2010
Haiti and Kyrgyzstan evacuations, 2011 Egypt and Libya evacuations, and 2015
Yemen and Nepal evacuations), which caused strong reactions and debates on
social media in China; analyze the theoretical basis of the home country’s respon-
sibility for protecting overseas citizens; discuss the specific national conditions of
China that partly rationalize its existing policies; and also reveal the potential
794 International Review of Administrative Sciences 88(3)
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