Lihong Shi

This project explores claims making for social citizenship among China’s shidu parents, or those who lost their only child born under the previous one-child policy, by delving into their ongoing demands for state responsibility to provide good-quality care in their old age. China’s one-child policy, which ended in 2015, has resulted in an increasing number of shidu parents. In recent year, shidu parents have turned their grief into rights-claim activism and have demanded that the state serve as the provider for their old age after they had surrendered their reproductive rights to have more than one child to the state’s ambition of population control. The Chinese authorities are being pressured by rights-claim activism to reevaluate the ways in which they have managed the risk that the one-child policy has produced among families with an only child and have responded by adopting policy changes. Taking citizenship as a process of claims making, this project studies shidu parents’ ongoing negotiations with the Chinese authorities to reveal how citizenship rights are claimed and state responsibility is contested and redefined.