Abstract:

As an emerging social group in China’s modernization drive, China’s “new citizens” have exhibited distinct political efficacy, which directly mirrors their relationship with the political system and their political capabilities and indirectly demonstrates the developmental characteristics of mankind at the phase of modernization. By employing a quantitative survey method, the article compares the political efficacy among “new citizens” with that among China’s rural and urban residents from horizontal, structural and hierarchical dimensions. As it turns out, political efficacy among China’s “new citizens” is extremely low in horizontal dimension, imbalanced as “lower at the inner circle, higher at outlier space” and inconsistent as “the nearer, the lower and vice versa”. The article concludes that political efficacy among China’s “new citizens” is a kind of disembedding political attitude in nature, typical among “marginalized groups” in the modern era.

Key words: disembeddedness, marginalized groups, China’s new citizens, political efficacy, political attitude