Join Stanford's Shorenstein APARC China Program as we welcome Assistant Professor Samantha Vortherms from U.C. Irvine to discuss the findings from her new book, Manipulating Authoritarian Citizenship: Security, Development, and Local Membership in China (Stanford University Press, 2024).  In the book, Professor Vortherms examines the crucial case of China—where internal citizenship regimes control who can and cannot become a local citizen through the household registration system (hukou)—and uncovers how autocrats use such institutions to create particularistic membership in citizenship.

Samantha Vortherms is an Assistant Professor at University of California, Irvine's Department of Political Science. She’s also a faculty affiliate at UCI’s Long U.S.-China Institute; Philosophy, Political Science, and Economic program; and a Non-resident Scholar at UC San Diego’s 21st Century China Center. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2017 and was a Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellow in Contemporary Asia at Stanford University’s APARC. From 2014-2016, she was a Visiting Research Fellow at the National School of Development's China Center for Health Economics Research at Peking University.