This chapter documents how post-Soviet women navigate the complexities of their children’s citizenship status in China, using the concept of ‘embodied border sites’ where racialised geopolitics intersect with individual values and family norms. It explores how issues of citizenship, identity and race shape the experiences of foreign mothers in determining where their children ‘belong’ nationally. I argue that, faced with their own precarious legal and economic status – and the constant fear of separation from their children, these mothers often leverage their native citizenship or informal dual-citizenship arrangements to protect their parental rights within China’s strict single-citizenship rules. The chapter details how China’s citizenship and immigration laws restrict foreign spouses on ‘family visitor’ visas from fully integrating into the reproductive and familial aspects of marriage, leading to difficult negotiations over their children’s citizenship status. These challenges underscore the inequalities embedded in family life for foreign mothers, who continually negotiate their parental rights and sense of belonging within a restrictive legal landscape.

This chapter offers an audiovisual exploration of a group wedding festival held on the Chinese–Russian border during the late summer festival of qixi jie [七夕节]. The official goal of this event is to strengthen Chinese–Russian relations, transforming a traditional celebration into an occasion for the articulation and celebration of international love and desire. The symbolic significance of the location, timing and aesthetics of the event, alongside the national, racial and gender identities of the participants, reveals key insights into China’s national aspirations. I argue that this state-sponsored group wedding is not simply a reflection of China’s foreign relations, nor is it an incidental event – it serves as a crucial site for observing and interrogating China’s geopolitical imaginaries and national desires. Furthermore, it provides a space for both reinforcing and contesting these aspirations through the performance of international love, gender roles, and an ideal form of marriage.

This chapter delves into the realities behind dominant Chinese narratives of ‘beautiful and happy’ Chinese–Russian international marriages by foregrounding the voices and experiences of migrant women from former Soviet republics who moved to China. Through personal stories shared by women who moved from the mid-1990s to the late 2010s, this chapter reveals a complex and layered picture that contrasts with prevailing stereotypes of marriage migration. While popular perceptions in China and the former Soviet states suggest that most women migrate to escape difficult conditions in the Russian Far East, settling permanently in Northeast China, the women’s accounts reveal diverse motivations and pathways. By tracing their stories of cross-border romance and the challenges of adapting to life in China, I argue that these diverse narratives reflect a shifting perception of white femininity within China’s transformations and global aspirations. Although white femininity is a desirable asset valorising Chinese masculinity and national image, its value remains constrained, insofar as it serves China’s patriarchal domestic sphere.

The conclusion synthesises the book’s arguments, highlighting how marriage and migration serve as pivotal sites for examining the intersection of geopolitical and intimate projects. It reveals the complex relationship between national desire, family, marriage and race within China’s quest to realise the China Dream. The war in Ukraine further amplified these narratives, reinforcing the image of China as a rising force capable of stepping in where other nations falter. A relational approach to China’s interactions with the world, particularly through the lenses of gender and race, necessitates an exploration of the historical, geographical and normative dynamics that shape China’s self–other relations. Russia, in this context, serves as a critical node, connecting China to the racialised global order through its proximity, historical ties and shared geopolitical outlooks. The gendered and racialised dimensions of these processes highlight that national security and international relations are deeply intertwined with intimate relations.

This chapter examines the visual narratives through which China’s ‘China Dream’ of global rise idealises a particular type of international marriage: a union between a Chinese man and a white woman who is transformed into an obedient daughter-in-law absorbed into Chinese patriarchal structures. Analysing three Chinese TV dramas and a fiction film that highlight pivotal moments in Chinese–Russian relations across three decades of reform (1990–2010s), the chapter explores how these cultural products construct a consistent portrayal of the white woman – strong, intelligent, beautiful and independent – who ultimately submits to Confucian patriarchal values under the guidance of a Chinese man. By connecting televised portrayals of Chinese–Russian romance with broader political and public discourses on China’s foreign relations, this chapter uncovers the role of cinematic geopolitics in creating a hyperreality that bridges fantasy and the everyday.

The historical background to democracy, which good citizens must defend, started with the Greeks. Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, and Polybius thought that political history was circular, which meant that good regimes, ruling on behalf of the people, held sway for a time but deteriorated into bad regimes – tyrannical – ruling for the rulers’ benefit. Their solution was to propose “mixed regimes,” containing monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic elements which, checked and balanced, would have to cooperate with each other by compromising different interests. Such a regime was the Roman Republic, which promoted both compromise and public virtue (“republicanism”) in the sense of devotion toward the state. During the Enlightenment, European political thinkers added the concepts of “sovereignty,” in order to impose public order, and “social contracts,” to make sovereigns at least somewhat answerable to subjects. Thus when the Founders convened to invent their government, they used “common sense,” prescribed by Paine, Jefferson, Madison, and others, to fashion a mixed government of special character. That government, which the Founders called “republican,” rested on a written “constitution,” which reined in “factions” via “checks and balances,” and which refrained from creating a “sovereign” who might, as in the French case almost immediately, plunge the nation into war.

This chapter begins the analysis of how American society prepared a space for someone like Trump to dominate public life. The major symptom was that citizens failed to not elect Trump and therefore twice elevated to be president a man who had no qualifications to administer the Executive Branch of a democratic government consisting of more than 4,000,000 employees and multiple responsibilities. He was, however, a “populist,” who promised to act on behalf of “the people” as if the people were entitled to throw off rule by “elites.” And together, he and his associates admired what scholars call “neoliberalism,” whereby many traditional, and democratic, political practices are overridden in favor of unleashing “private innovators” – such as Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg – to acquire enormous wealth and influence. Assuming that Trump is a populist, we should observe that America’s crisis is not so much a failure of democratic “institutions” – agencies, procedures, etc. – as it is that “citizens” have failed to vote to support those institutions. Thus Defending Democracy is about how citizens must do their job – their “vocation” – more and better.

The “information system” should provide understanding, which is needed for the practice of good citizenship. But it is not working well. This started with the rise of advertising in the late 19th century, when industrial output rose so dramatically that consumers had to be persuaded – on the basis of impulses and sentiments – to buy what they wanted rather than what they needed. When this sort of talk became obviously effective, public relations emerged to make businessmen, like Rockefeller, look good, and then, during World War I, propaganda was used to make the government look less warlike than the nasty “Huns.” Thus a powerful language of selling was introduced into American life, preferring efficacy rather than Enlightenment standards of truth, veracity, and reason. Scholarly explanations for how this all worked started with Marshall McCluhan who said that each “medium” – such as books or the telegraph – controls what kind of messages we can transmit. Then Neil Postman pointed out that the medium of commercial television will “amuse us to death” by ignoring our real needs in favor of peddling profitable wants. Thus Postman alerted us to how, since he wrote, getting our attention via slippery language has become the dominant business model for corporations today and has corrupted the marketplace for ideas.

The 1930s did not resolve doubts about the viability of democracy, but military success in World War II enhanced democracy’s reputation. In 1951, Hannah Arendt pointed out that German citizens had not managed to stop Hitler, but discussion of their failure was set aside by American intellectuals focused on communism during the Cold War. They said, in “the end of ideology” movement, that democrats don’t have to think but to do – to oppose the USSR and to campaign for “incremental economic progress” at home. Therefore, when the Cold War ended, democrats were mostly wedded to marketplace practices of “neoliberalism” without strong political dimensions. Consequently, when that neoliberalism sagged in 2008, there was no widely shared democratic theory available to inspire resentful people. Into this vacuum stepped the Republican Party, which since Barry Goldwater had become ideologically committed to capitalism, hostile to “government activism” (such as the New Deal), enthusiastic about public “school privatization,” scornful of “abortion rights” but zealous about “religious tradition,” and set on appointing right-wing judges who would empower money more than people, as in permitting wealthy individuals and corporations to make unlimited political contributions (Elon Musk alone contributed $250,000,000 to the Republican Party in 2024). Thus the country lapsed more and more into a “culture war,” wherein Democrats were pluralistic and Republicans promoted ideological convictions.

Weber overlooked Citizens, but this essay concludes that, in truth, this role in any society is not an independent factor but a “dependent variable.” It depends on “common sense,” which means understandings which are shared by members of the same community but differ from one community to another – such as between what is demanded of good Americans and good Indonesians. Weber’s “ethic of responsibility” helps us to frame the subject, though, by urging us to measure every candidate’s “cause” against its potential consequences and then instructing citizens to support only good cause candidates. Trump has no cause, though, because he does not offer intelligible policies (he issues no position papers) but exploits his “charisma” to engage in politics as a program of exciting “show business” where the goal is achieve headlines every day and get the show renewed. In this sense, Trump is a modern “Pied Piper,” using the arts of advertising, public relations, and propaganda to “entertain” rather than to “educate,” to “amuse” rather than to promote a coherent national “vision.” What scholars must investigate now is why 77,000,0000 million American citizens, in the words of Neil Postman, found Trump “amusing” and voted for him. Can democracy survive if citizens are tempted to vote for fun and, say, ignore a politician’s disdain for global warming, international alliances, science, and top-notch higher education?

In 1984, Winston Smith said that freedom is the right to step back from lies and say that 2 and 2 make 4. But today, even though we are free in Smith’s sense, someone else will say, loudly and repeatedly, that 2 and 2 make 5. And who will separate for us the wheat from the chaff? Therefore free speech is no longer always helpful, as thinkers like Mill and Holmes thought, in which case we must consider how to repair the marketplace for ideas so that we can advance in solid knowledge rather than drown in mere opinions. John Thompson suggested a “Trump Test,” whereby “public language… must distinguish between… grown up political discourse and outright nonsense.” This can be done in two ways. We can wait until our speakers and influencers fix their discourse, which may take many years, or we can fix the information system that conveys to us too many incorrect propositions. If we chose the second option, what needs to be done is clear. We must regulate the use of smart phones so as not to permit them to maintain a conversation that fractures modern society and muddles modern thinking. Of course, to overcome such a pleasant national addiction will require commitment to moderate political activism, and each of us must look for inspiration to that end. Thomas Paine told us that we have the power to remake the world. He did, and so can we.

This Introduction notes that 77,000,000 American citizens voted for Donald Trump even though he was a convicted felon and autocratic narcissist. They therefore abandoned the “self-evident truth” principles of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness inscribed in the Declaration of Independence. That is, they failed to exercise citizenship as a vocation dedicated to good public behavior which supports voting in favor of candidates who will protect and maintain democratic values and institutions. Anticipating further analysis in later chapters, the Introduction ascribes this failure of responsible citizenship to, among other causes, the marketplace for ideas today which is overloaded with information and disinformation, leading to muddled thinking, a scarcity of common sense, and what Neil Postman called a media imperative of “amusing ourselves to death,” or entertainment rather than education.