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

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.