Refusable citizenship: stateless Myanmar Muslims and the contingent politics of belonging in China’s southwestern borderlands

This article develops the concept of refusable citizenship to analyze the lived experiences and strategic citizenship practices of stateless Myanmar Muslims in Ruili, China's key trade hub on the China-Myanmar border. Despite their lack of legal status from either country, Myanmar Muslims have enacted layered forms of citizenship – economic, cultural, political, and transnational – through the dominance in jadeite trade, religious practices, community governance, and cross-border diplomacy. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork, the paper highlights how these practices constitute forms of negotiated belonging that are conditionally tolerated by local authorities, but perpetually subject to revocation by shifting national priorities, central-local tensions, and Myanmar's political instability.