Mass capture: the making of non-citizens and the Mainland Travel Permit for Hong Kong and Macau Residents

作者：Cho Lily

来源：Mobilities, 2017, 12(2): 188-198.

DOI：10.1080/17450101.2017.1292776

• Mass capture
• citizenship
• non-citizens
• identity cards

Through an examination of the Mainland Travel Permit for Hong Kong and Macau Residents, this paper argues that there is a disjuncture between the idea of home and citizenship for mobile Chinese subjects and that this disjuncture reveals the crucial and constant work of defining non-citizens in order to safeguard citizenship. That is, non-citizens are essential for the definition of citizenship. Non-citizens are not simply there, as refugees, migrants, or stateless people. Rather, the state must engage in constant project of defining them through a process that I identify as mass capture. I develop the concept of mass capture by engaging with Agre's work differentiating surveillance from capture. Agre's insistence upon capture as a process that has a grammar, and thus a process that demands the intricacies of reading, allows for a way of understanding the state's large-scale collection of personal data in terms that take up surveillance as a logic of legibility.

• 出版日期2017