English integrated edition · v003
Chapter 20 State Incorporation of Differences: How Differences Are Formatted, Mutually Recognized, and Connected to Chains of Implementation
Language, memory, locality, marriage, rites and customs, migration, boundaries, shared consequences, and shared recognition form historical communities within networks of long-term interaction. A community has language, memory, boundaries, shared life, and paths of shared responsibility. Yet when some of these differences enter the relevant state matters, specific personnel process them anew under the applicable procedures. This processing takes different forms: languages are incorporated into arrangements for official languages, languages of schooling, or examination languages; place names are fixed as administrative divisions; community boundaries are connected to registration fields, regional institutions, or legal recognition; migration leaves household-registration transfers, residence registration, or border records; and shared harm is organized into commemorative days, teaching materials, museums, or archives. National-community formation produces the boundaries of historical communities; state incorporation of differences connects differences to chains of law, administration, archives, and implementation.
State incorporation of differences is neither the state as an entity pressing down from above nor the simple sum of institutionalization, class-image formation, and national-community formation. It connects differentiating units dispersed across families, localities, markets, communities, and workplaces to a network of nodes of greater intensity, wider reach, and stronger capacity for implementation. A person's birthplace, household registration, nationality, ethnicity, age, sex, marriage, educational qualifications, occupation, tax records, eligibility for military service, records of legal violations, property, border position, welfare eligibility, and educational eligibility do not naturally become state order. They must first enter documents, numbers, fields, archives, qualifications, permits, penalties, welfare, taxation, military service, border records, and legal consequences. After differences in lived life enter state nodes, specific personnel process them under legal rules at service counters and in implementing agencies, using documents, archives, and systems to extract them anew, preserve them, recognize them across nodes, and give them form. State incorporation does not create these differences out of nothing; it enables existing materials to enter preservation, verification, and the processing of consequences across nodes.
When a child enters the education system, the fact of birth must be reported under household-registration rules. When school admission is sought, some of the materials concerning household registration, residence, rental arrangements, parents' social insurance, school districts, or applications may be examined under local policy and the relevant admission category. After enrollment is completed, the school establishes and updates the student's registration under student-registration rules. This is not one fixed chain of materials identical everywhere. A child does not naturally become a student in the state education system simply by reaching a certain age. Age is only one difference. At different stages of processing, birth certificates, household registration, residence materials, or parental materials are checked according to the applicable conditions; school places constrain resource allocation, while application counters are concrete positions for processing materials. Enrollment is not a single educational event but a process in which family differences, local differences, and state archives are connected to chains of implementation. The fact of the child's birth, the home address, the parents' employment materials, and school places are held at different positions; they connect respectively to educational positions such as admission review, the allocation of places, and student registration established after enrollment.
A migrant worker's identity card may be valid while his household registration is elsewhere. He does live in the city, yet his residence registration is unstable. He does work on a construction site, yet his labor contract, wage records, social insurance contributions, and employer information may be disconnected. Once wages are in arrears, what labor inspection and arbitration examine is not the hardship of everyday life but whether the employment relationship can be proved, the employer identified, and the unpaid wages brought into a procedure. The difficulty facing migrants is often not a complete lack of identity but an identity dispersed across several chains of implementation that cannot readily recognize one another's materials. Residence, work, and remuneration are scattered among documents, registrations, contracts, and records. The materials connected through them may lead to determinations concerning work-related injury, remuneration, or eligibility.
Family languages, local rites and customs, migration memory, and community boundaries form historical communities through national-community formation. Once they enter state incorporation of differences, some of these differences become ethnic registration, school language policies, textbook narratives, cultural protection projects, administrative classifications, resource allocation, and eligibility for representation. National-community formation produces the boundaries of historical communities; state incorporation turns some of their differences into registrations, teaching materials, policies, administrative divisions, and enforceable qualifications. State registration is not the national community itself, but it changes the community's external position and also changes who within it is seen, represented, or suppressed. Differences of national communities are connected to family languages, local rites and customs, and community memory; the resulting registrations and materials affect positions in classification, representation, and resources.
The three chains extract different materials and produce different consequences. They cannot be reduced to a single, one-time processing of the same kind of material. In these chains, specific personnel at the relevant positions must verify differences and materials dispersed across different places, then send the parts that can be established on to the next stage of processing. Family relations, workplaces, and national communities are not created by state registration. Yet it is upon entering state nodes that differences already formed within families, workplaces, and communities acquire another form in which they can be preserved, compared, or put into effect.
For this reason, the state cannot be portrayed as one enormous person, as though it stood outside society, could see everyone at once, and could handle all differences with a single command. The state is a high-intensity network of differentiation nodes, not a unified personality or a unified consciousness. Agencies, documents, archives, laws, forms, schools, police, courts, the military, borders, taxation, social insurance, neighborhoods, and administrative divisions are all nodes in state incorporation of differences. Nodes are not subjects acting on their own but actual positions at which personnel, materials, authority, and procedures connect. Specific personnel or procedures within them extract the relevant differences and connect them to consequences.
Within these nodes, different matters and stages connect only the corresponding materials under the applicable rules. When an identity card is processed, birth certificates, household registration, photographs, addresses, family relations, or records in the public security system provide different clues for different processing and verification matters; not everyone must resubmit all these materials on every occasion. When a child enrolls, materials such as household registration, a residence permit, parents' social insurance, property ownership or a rental filing are reviewed according to the local requirements for the year and category concerned. School-district divisions and application systems provide paths for allocation, and student registration is established after enrollment is completed.
After a worker is injured, the social insurance administrative department determines whether the injury is work-related on the basis of materials concerning the employment relationship, medical records, and other evidence. The employer's attitude affects how materials connect, but lack of acknowledgment by the employer does not amount to a veto over that determination. Social insurance contributions concern payment of the corresponding benefits; work-capacity appraisal is handled separately under its applicable conditions and cannot be listed as a common prerequisite for all work-related injury procedures and eligibility for compensation. People crossing a border undergo border inspection on the basis of nationality, passports, entry and exit records, travel purposes, and risk judgments. Visas are also checked according to the applicable status and travel matter; not everyone requires a visa. These nodes belong to different places and institutions; the structural generalization “the state” cannot replace the personnel, documents, and procedures within them.
Nodes differ in the materials they can extract, the rules they apply, the authority they possess, and the consequences to which they connect. Registration materials preserved by agencies, admission materials checked by schools, evidence handled by courts, identities and records used by police, eligibility assessed by the military, residence circumstances known to neighborhood organizations, and documents and travel materials checked at borders all have different points of entry. The fact that one position holds information does not mean that another can already extract it. What processing the same name or address can support at different positions often changes with the scope of the materials. Schools can establish student registration and process admissions; courts can make judgments within their procedures; police and border inspection handle identity, records, and passage within their respective scopes. Residence relations visible to neighborhood organizations may not directly serve as a basis elsewhere. Nodes sometimes connect and sometimes leave breaks. Even if materials have been preserved or recognized at one position, the receiving position must still judge whether they can be used under its own authority, rules, and procedures. If materials are insufficient, formats do not fit, or the scope of extraction differs, processing may stop where it is. The power of state incorporation of differences comes from relations that can actually connect nodes; it does not require the assumption that every position obeys the same will.
State incorporation of differences is the process by which state nodes format dispersed differences into an order of implementation within which they can be identified, registered, mutually recognized, allocated and coordinated, rewarded or punished, and excluded. The most important part of this definition is not the grand word “state” but how differences change form. Families, localities, nations, languages, property, labor, debt, illness, migration, marriage, education, risk, and conflict exist before state intervention. The state is not the source of all differences, but it changes how these differences are preserved, extracted, mutually recognized, and put into effect. In everyday life, “living here” may be known only to neighbors, the landlord, and people in the market; once it enters the relevant administrative matter, it may take the corresponding form of household registration, a residence permit, a rental filing, or address registration. In everyday life, “having a child” may be simply a family fact; at different stages such as reporting, school admission, or the creation of records, it is extracted under the rules in the respective forms of birth certificates, household registration, and guardianship relations; student registration is established after initial enrollment, while vaccination records are checked under their specialized provisions. In everyday life, “having been punished” may be a single event; once it enters legal and administrative procedures, it generates a judgment or penalty record according to its nature; it connects to credit restrictions or affects future eligibility determinations only where the corresponding statutory conditions and subject matter apply. State incorporation of differences is not simple recording. It rewrites differences in lived life into forms that state nodes can preserve, compare, mutually recognize, and put into effect.
This rewriting proceeds through nine stages: identification, formatting, registration, classification, certification, mutual recognition, allocation and coordination, implementation, and write-back. Each has its own position of processing. Completion of one stage does not guarantee that the next will be established. Materials must still pass through the rules, authority, and procedures of the relevant nodes before they can possibly enter an order of implementation of wider scope. Identification gives a person or matter an entry point through which it can be extracted; formatting places materials from lived life in fields, documents, or other processable forms; registration leaves records of those forms that can be checked again. A name, address, or photograph may make an object identifiable without guaranteeing that residence, family, or employment circumstances have been fully entered in a suitable format, still less that the corresponding records have been registered and established.
Once materials enter processing, classification places them on different paths, certification judges whether they count at a given position, and only mutual recognition gives a record the opportunity to cross to other nodes. The categories used in classification may not be adopted at the receiving position, and registered materials may not yet have passed certification. Even if certification is established at one position, another may refuse to use the materials because their scope, format, or the relevant authority differs. Whether the chain can continue depends on whether classification, certification, and mutual recognition can connect at the receiving position.
Allocation and coordination then connect usable materials to the distribution of resources, responsibility, or risk. Implementation turns some of these allocations into actual consequences. Write-back forms when these results of processing are preserved as differences available for renewed extraction in the future. Only when specific personnel or procedures later retrieve, interpret, or assign weight to them anew in new matters do they re-enter real consequences. Each connection depends on whether materials can be extracted at that time, who has authority to process them, how rules apply, and whether the procedure can be completed. Not every difference passes through all the stages in sequence. Differences enter an order of implementation of wider scope only where the relevant stages actually connect in concrete matters.
The first step in state incorporation of differences is to turn people and matters in flux into objects that can be reliably extracted. A person can be recognized in everyday life by family, neighbors, colleagues, and people from the same home area, but recognition by acquaintances does not mean that state nodes can process that person. State nodes need stable entry points for identification: a name is one, a date of birth another; sex, photographs, fingerprints, identity-card numbers, household-registration addresses, nationality, ethnicity, family relations, schools, employers, property, vehicles, and accounts can all become entry points. They allow a person to be extracted at different places. In everyday movement, names may recur, people may migrate, families may disperse, and workers may change employers; state incorporation therefore has to rely on these more stable means of identification.
Stable identification is not intended to compress a person into a single label but to enable different nodes to match the same material to a position that can be checked. Which entry points are adopted and which relations in lived life are suppressed directly affect subsequent processing. These entry points offer different clues for verification and often need to work together: names and dates of birth connect people to verifiable birth materials; photographs and fingerprints distinguish people with the same name or similar appearance; addresses place people at a residence position; identity numbers and existing documents allow previously formed records to be extracted. When one entry point is insufficient, the processor must still return to available materials to confirm the correspondence. Migration separates an address from everyday residence; family dispersal leaves relational materials at different positions; a change of employer may fragment work experience across different records. People with the same name are not necessarily the same object, nor do those bearing the same name necessarily carry the same relations in lived life.
Identification is not a neutral act. Once some differences become entry points for identification, others are suppressed: an identity-card number is easier to extract than a person's reputation in the village, a household-registration address easier than actual residence relations, and a registered name easier than an everyday form of address. This step has already changed how a person is seen. Yet an identifiable object is not the whole person. Names, photographs, addresses, identity numbers, and existing documents provide only a starting point for verification. They make processing materials possible but do not exhaust a person's relations, experience, and positions. Differences in lived life that have not entered these entry points are not necessarily absent; the current node may simply lack the materials and means to process them. Memories, care, circumstances, and community relations not extracted through these entry points continue to exert real effects in everyday life.
After identification, differences still cannot directly enter implementation: they must be formatted. Formatting is the state's rewriting of differences in lived life into forms it can preserve, compare, and put into effect. The state does not receive life as it is. It does not preserve all of a person's experience, relations, and circumstances; instead, it requires differences to enter processable formats. For someone living here, the corresponding materials concerning household registration, a residence permit, a rental filing, or address registration are required according to the concrete matter. For someone who is ill, the condition is presented through medical records and diagnoses; medical-insurance coverage lists are used to check reimbursable expenses, while disability appraisal is conducted only where the relevant matter requires it. When someone has a child, the fact of birth enters birth certification and household registration, guardianship relations are confirmed under the corresponding requirements, and student registration is established after school enrollment is completed. For someone who owns property, the relevant matters are recorded respectively in property certificates, vehicle registration, or tax records. Belonging to a community is represented in the relevant matters through nationality, ethnic registration, or identity documents. Having been punished generates a judgment or penalty record according to the nature of the case, and connects to credit restrictions where the statutory requirements are met.
Many mismatches arise between facts of life and formats. A person really lives in the city but lacks corresponding residence materials. A child really lives with the parents, but the guardianship materials are incomplete. A worker really was injured on a construction site, but the employment relationship has not been formatted into a contract and social insurance records. A community really has its own language, memory, and boundaries, but state registration leaves only one field. The key to state incorporation of differences is not simply “whether the facts exist” but also whether they can enter state formats.
Only after facts of life enter forms, fields, archives, documents, qualifications, or records do they become relatively easy to preserve, compare, and transfer. This conversion is not reception by an empty container: it selects the parts that can be entered, arranges how materials are compared with one another, and makes some differences easier to preserve, compare, and put into effect. Fields determine which parts can remain in a fixed form; documents and archives allow some materials to be extracted at subsequent positions; eligibility materials connect certain contents to consequences that can be processed. Residence, illness, kinship, labor, and property originally carry different relations and experiences. Once broken into items that can be filled in and checked, formerly dispersed differences acquire the conditions for comparison and transfer across nodes. This conversion increases the intensity of processing, but at the same time suppresses relational backgrounds, community memory, concrete circumstances, and complete experiences. Without corresponding positions, relational backgrounds, community memory, and concrete circumstances are harder to bring in fully along with the materials.
Formatting remains bounded by facts of life and the scope of the materials. Formats change which differences can be preserved, compared, and put into effect, but cannot by themselves replace facts of life. Preservable forms make the parts not entered in them harder to see at particular nodes; forms and records themselves do not produce implementation results on their own. A form can show an address without necessarily showing actual care relations. Medical records preserve certain conditions but cannot replace a person's entire situation. Employment or property materials left in archives likewise cover only the parts that can be entered and checked. Formats make processing more stable while leaving compression and omissions. Whether consequences form still depends on processing at the relevant positions in accordance with materials, authority, and procedures.
After formatting, differences must still be registered under their respective rules. The fact of birth enters household registration through reporting; marriage relations enter marriage information after verification by marriage registration authorities; property rights and legally prescribed matters are entered in the real-property register; schools establish and update student registration after enrollment; administrative penalties produce corresponding records under penalty decisions and statutory disclosure rules. Registration can form materials that may be extracted again in the future. Whether they become effective again still depends on subsequent events, authority, procedures, and interpretation; records themselves are not acting subjects. [F13]
Registration is not simple recording: it determines whether a difference can later be extracted, recognized, and put into effect. A fact may still exist without registration yet be unable to pass through state nodes. Registration does not necessarily make a fact more real, but it makes the fact easier for the state to extract. Yet the materials registration leaves are not a person's complete identity, and their contents may not fully match actual life. Registration gives differences a form in which they can be extracted repeatedly, but cannot settle all future judgments. Whether a record can be recognized or connected to substantive consequences must still be handled by concrete nodes under existing rules and procedures. Even where registration exists, subsequent nodes may handle matters differently because the scope of materials or review requirements differ.
Registration of births, marriages, property, student status, and penalties turns matters originally established only within the relations of the time into materials that can later be located and checked repeatedly. Birth materials can connect to household registration and later documents, providing a starting point for verification in subsequent document applications or the establishment of student registration. Marriage materials can enter judgments about relations; property and student-registration records give residence, property, or educational positions a verifiable form; penalty records preserve traces of how particular matters were handled. Once formed and entered in a register, materials preserve not life itself but some of its contents that can be located and checked later. A birth, a marriage, an item of real property, a student registration, or a penalty each has its own time of recording and scope of matters recorded. Registration enables later processors to find these materials but does not bring all the relations of life at that time before them.
As time passes, a distance may open between records and present life. Marriage relations can change, and the actual use of property and an individual's educational position may differ from those at the time of recording. The matter to which a penalty record refers likewise cannot replace substantive identification of current circumstances. Extracting an existing registration means returning to verifiable material, not treating the past directly as the present.
Registration can send materials to subsequent nodes, but a record does not itself impose qualifications, responsibilities, or restrictions on a person. Birth registration does not directly complete school enrollment, nor does student registration settle every educational judgment. Only when relevant records are used in concrete matters can they connect to corresponding consequences. If relations in lived life have changed, registration can still establish that certain material once held true, but cannot extend the past state directly into the present. It makes differences across time traceable while retaining the distance between the scope of the record and changes in reality.
After registration, differences are placed in categories: citizens, residents, students, workers, taxpayers, military personnel, people serving sentences, recipients of the minimum subsistence guarantee, migrants, foreigners, minors, retirees, and people at borders. These are not neutral names. Classification does not name a person; it determines the chain of implementation along which that person will be processed. Categories tell processors which materials to start from, but each path handles different matters. Someone classified as a student enters processing involving student registration, examinations, further education, financial aid, and school rules. Someone classified as a taxpayer enters processing involving income, property, declarations, inspections, and collection. Someone classified as a recipient of the minimum subsistence guarantee enters household-income and property checks, assistance eligibility, and periodic review. Someone classified as a person at a border enters processing involving passports, visas, entry and exit records, examination, and passage restrictions. Classification compresses complex life into paths that can be put into effect. This is its power and its danger.
The same person can simultaneously occupy the existing categories of resident, worker, student, or others without appearing under all those categories in every matter. Educational positions primarily use materials relevant to student registration and admission; employment matters extract the parts concerning work relations; resident or taxpayer materials operate only in the corresponding processing. Students may connect to student registration, examinations, and aid; workers to employment materials and responsibility; taxpayers, military personnel, or recipients of the minimum subsistence guarantee to different positions of eligibility, obligation, or protection. Overlapping categories show only that different directions of processing converge on the same person. Adding several names does not produce a complete identity, still less can the relationship be reversed and those names treated as what the person fundamentally is in society.
A category can bring a set of differences onto a designated path, but cannot also explain the family responsibilities, community relations, and life experiences that path does not extract. Some care, experiences, and community relations are difficult to accommodate in existing categories or relevant only to a particular matter. They have not thereby disappeared from reality; they simply enter less often into the processing path opened by that category. Classification brings some differences onto processing paths that can be put into effect, but this does not mean that the consequences of implementation have already formed. It cannot determine a person's entire situation. Categories point toward what can be processed; they are not a person's essence, nor can they be inverted into what social relations fundamentally are.
Unlike classification, which marks out paths, certification involves the state not merely recording differences but also judging whether the corresponding materials have the efficacy required for use in a particular matter. Certification determines whether a difference can enter state consequences. It concerns concrete matters such as whether an identity card is valid, educational qualifications are recognized, a marriage is registered, property rights are confirmed, disability has been appraised, a record of legal violation is established, or a person's border status allows passage. There is a clear boundary between everyday statements and formal state certification. Saying one lives here is not equivalent to state nodes recognizing that residence. Saying one has received education is not equivalent to recognition of educational qualifications. Saying one is injured does not establish a disability grade. Nor does saying one has family responsibilities establish eligibility for assistance.
Certification hardens differences. Once certification is established, differences can connect to welfare, compensation, responsibility, punishment, qualifications, and restrictions. If certification fails, a difference may be unable to enter state consequences even though it really exists in life. Identity cards, educational qualifications, marriage, property, disability, records of legal violations, and border status may already have corresponding materials, but the existence of materials does not mean that they already count. Preservation makes verification of some content possible. Submitting materials to a specific service counter or node certainly brings them before a particular question, yet does not establish whether that position can treat them as a basis for processing.
Certification occurs at positions authorized to process matters; materials do not accomplish it by virtue of their form alone. Schools, courts, service counters, and border inspection face different matters. Schools handle education-related materials; courts judge evidence under their procedures; counters and border inspection can confirm identity, eligibility, or conditions for passage only within their respective matters. Which materials each node recognizes remains bounded by its existing scope of processing and procedural conditions. Between the existence of materials and successful certification lie at least several distinct positions: materials are first preserved, the person concerned or relevant personnel then submit them to a concrete node, and an authorized processor checks their form, content, and subject matter to establish whether they meet the rules applied to the current question.
Verification asks whether materials connect to the current matter; it does not deliver an omniscient verdict on the facts of life. A relation or experience may really exist without appearing in the form adopted at that position. If the scope and content of the materials do not correspond to the matter to be handled, certification cannot be established there. Only when materials, the matter, authority, and rules connect at that position is certification established for that question. This result can lead to corresponding consequences, but it is not a determination of the person's entire life.
Once certification is established at one position, materials can connect to consequences in that matter, but the conclusion does not naturally cover other nodes. When purpose, duration, and scope of application change, the receiving position also faces a different question and must examine the matter anew. Failure to establish certification temporarily halts that particular state consequence; it does not erase facts that have already occurred in life.
The intensity of state incorporation of differences lies not only in a particular node recognizing you, but also in documents, numbers, qualifications, and archives being able to enter subsequent nodes where concrete rules permit. Resident identity cards are used only in matters requiring proof of identity; education authorities and schools establish and update student registration under the rules; social insurance agencies preserve contribution and benefit records; court-imposed consumption restrictions require an enforcement decision and assistance procedures; access to real-property registration information also requires a legally specified status, an investigative matter, or a legitimate purpose. Records cannot circulate freely without limits of authority, purpose, jurisdiction, and procedure. [F12]
Mutual recognition gives local records the possibility of connecting across settings. The intensity of state incorporation of differences comes from different nodes being able to extract the same set of formatted differences: the stronger the mutual recognition, the more readily differences can cross settings; the weaker it is, the more readily people become stuck between nodes. Without these connections, records often remain at the original node: what a school knows is not necessarily known to a hospital; what a neighborhood organization knows may not be used by a bank; local recognition may not allow passage at a border.
An identity card gives several positions the opportunity to identify the same object; student registration can be extracted in education-related matters; social insurance, court records, and property registration each may also be used at subsequent positions. For a local record to leave its original place of preservation and enter another node, its format must first be readable so that the receiving position can identify the material. Readability, however, does not yet mean suitability for the current question. Schools, hospitals, banks, borders, courts, and neighborhood organizations handle different matters. An address, student registration, or property registration may be relevant at one position but have no use at another. If the object, time, or content referred to by the materials cannot connect to the question at hand, even a complete record may remain within its original scope of preservation.
Even if materials are readable and relevant, the receiving position must also have authority to extract and use them, and its procedure must permit them to enter current processing. What is known at one position is not necessarily open to inspection or use as a basis for processing at another. Nodes cannot indiscriminately use one another's materials. Mutual recognition always remains subject to these concrete boundaries; it is not a condition in which all nodes share all information.
Within the established path for a particular matter, mutual recognition may extend along the entire path or take materials only to some positions. Student registration can connect to educational matters without necessarily serving banking or border matters. Property registration can be extracted in relevant matters without necessarily directly supporting other qualifications. The intensity of state incorporation of differences is manifested in how many relations materials can actually pass through. Mutual recognition thus takes the form of bounded but actual connections between concrete nodes, not the automatic passage of all information within a single whole.
Certified and mutually recognized differences can enter allocation and coordination only through the corresponding processing: who enrolls, pays taxes, serves in the military, receives welfare, undergoes examination, is subject to levies or expropriation, is resettled, is restricted, is isolated, or receives assistance. Allocation and coordination connect classified and certified materials to the distribution of resources, responsibility, and risk, determining which differences become resources, obligations, or risks. This is not mere roster management, nor can it accomplish itself apart from concrete nodes, rules, and authority. Who enters which path still depends on whether existing qualifications, records, examination, and processing authority can connect within the same chain.
In concrete matters, the incorporation of differences has definite material bases and limits imposed by rules. A child's household registration, residence, or parents' social insurance is subject to the relevant admission rules according to the locality, year, and category, and connects to school-district divisions and the allocation of places. After initial enrollment formalities are completed, the school establishes student records under student-registration rules. A family's income, property, illness, and disability certificates affect the allocation of assistance resources. Yet the minimum subsistence guarantee and medical assistance are handled separately under conditions such as household economic circumstances, assistance categories, and medical expenses. Different processors act within their respective authority; these procedures cannot be merged into one unified allocation and coordination process.
The allocation of obligations and controls likewise proceeds through the corresponding materials and nodes. A young person's age, health, household registration, and political record affect the distribution of military-service responsibilities. An enterprise's registration, taxation, records of legal violations, and credit rating affect the direction of inspections, loans, permits, and penalties. These materials are retrieved only in concrete inspections, licensing, or other legally prescribed matters.
Classification places materials on a processing path; certification judges whether they count in a concrete matter; mutual recognition determines whether they can cross to another position. When these conditions are met, allocation and coordination direct resources, responsibility, and risk accordingly. These stages connect but cannot replace one another. Moreover, allocation and coordination form paths of distribution; only implementation brings permissions, restrictions, assistance, levies or expropriation, or other consequences into effect. Bringing an object within the scope of an arrangement does not mean that the specific permission, restriction, assistance, or levy or expropriation arranged in that matter has been carried out. Waiting for review within a procedure or remaining at the stage of eligibility determination may already be having real effects on a person's life arrangements and circumstances. This does not mean that the corresponding payment, restriction, or levy or expropriation has been implemented. Only when subsequent implementing positions actually act in accordance with their responsibilities are the corresponding consequences of implementation—payments, restrictions, or other measures—truly established. This distinction prevents state incorporation of differences from being written as an abstract will allocating everything on its own.
Centralized decision-making within state incorporation of differences cannot be observed only from the last service counter or implementing position. Who controls the use of assets, whether equipment and data can be brought into processing, who holds nominal ownership and where actual control lies, and which personnel and decision procedures allocate budgets, staff, time, and service coverage all constrain in advance the materials that the final position can use, the exceptions it can allow, and the supplementation and correction it can provide. When the same rule produces different results at well-resourced and resource-poor nodes, analysts must trace the allocation decisions, rather than attributing all differences to the attitudes of frontline personnel.
Authorization between higher and lower levels must also be separated from coordination across nodes. Unified formats, database fields, review requirements, and transfer rules can maintain connections among processing at several positions. Yet those who actually set, interpret, and implement these requirements are concrete rule-makers, authorizers, data managers, reviewers, and receiving personnel. The abilities to review an existing determination, revoke consequences, correct records, and change who exercises discretion through appointments, supervision, or temporary orders may be dispersed across different positions. Formal authorization does not automatically amount to actual processing capacity: authority over materials, resources, time limits, and the documents in force when the event occurred must also be checked.
Responsibility should be distributed along the actual connections among design, allocation, authorization, transfer, discretion, implementation, and correction. Rule designers and resource allocators delimit the available paths; those who authorize and transfer carry requirements to subsequent positions; frontline personnel process matters within the established scope. Personnel with the ability to review, revoke, appoint, supervise, or correct may affect whether consequences persist. The fact that the last action is completed at the grassroots does not place all responsibility at the end of the chain. Nor can the participation of many positions allow responsibility to dissolve into an abstract state, institution, or organization.
The fact that a position continually benefits can be a clue for investigating whether it helps maintain an arrangement; benefit alone cannot establish motive, authority, or causal responsibility. Knowing the accumulated consequences but lacking the ability to change them differs, in its conditions of responsibility, from holding corrective authority yet refusing to act. Where someone can stop a transfer, raise an objection, or initiate review yet maintains the original arrangement, their choices, authority, and consequences must also be examined separately. Centralized power is formed through these traceable relations of control, allocation, authorization, and correction. There is no need to write the state, institutions, ownership, budgets, or databases as unified acting subjects.
Implementation makes differences not merely visible but consequential. Even where earlier recording, classification, certification, mutual recognition, and allocation and coordination have brought differences to processable positions, this does not yet mean that the specific payments, restrictions, passage, or assistance arranged in that matter have been carried out. A judgment, once issued, can change relations of responsibility in the relevant matter; whether the specific payment or restriction is implemented must still be checked at the corresponding stages of implementation. Permissions, prohibitions, assistance, penalties, detention, judgments, migration, enrollment, welfare, border inspection, or compulsory enforcement must be carried out at the concrete positions responsible for those consequences before materials and judgments become tangible passage, qualifications, responsibilities, resources, or scope for action. The intensity of state incorporation of differences appears here: once a difference enters a chain of implementation, it is no longer merely a matter of how others see someone. It substantively affects whether that person can enroll, migrate, obtain a document, pay taxes, join the military, receive welfare, leave the country, be punished, or receive assistance. Implementation is therefore not an isolated mechanical act at the end of a chain. It actually changes people's real positions: a document can allow passage, a record can impose restrictions, a qualification can secure assistance, and a judgment can change a person's future settings.
The formation of consequences always depends on concrete personnel, materials, rules, authority, and procedures connecting with one another. A chain of implementation cannot be treated as an abstract mechanism running on its own. What matters in implementation is not only that a result has coercive force, but also that a concrete processing position can bring an existing judgment into concrete activity. After admission materials have been checked, the school acts on the corresponding review results to process admission, enrollment, and related matters. Only then is that admission arrangement carried out, with student registration established under the rules after initial enrollment. After border materials have been checked, border inspection personnel permit or restrict passage according to the verification results and their own authority; only then does a record become an actual scope for action. Permissions, assistance, penalties, judgments, and compulsory enforcement work in the same way: preceding classification, certification, mutual recognition, and allocation and coordination prepare the path; actual action by the positions responsible for implementation brings resources, responsibilities, or restrictions into life.
Implementing positions always handle particular matters at hand, not the whole person and the person's entire life. A document is checked at border inspection, a qualification is used in enrollment or welfare processing, a record connects to consequences in punishment or compulsory enforcement: each effect comes through its materials, rules, authority, and procedures. If materials have not entered a usable form, the rules do not cover the current matter, or processing authority fails to connect, earlier records and judgments do not turn into consequences on their own. These effects have clear boundaries of subject matter and authority. One completed implementation cannot justify extending the same judgment to all of that person's qualifications, relations, and future positions. Even if the same material has been recognized elsewhere, the implementing position must still confirm its relation to the present consequence. It cannot use the previous node's judgment to exceed its own authority or directly expand the scope of effects. Implementation changes what people can do now, which positions they can enter, and what responsibilities they must bear. It rearranges the actual scope of activity but does not exhaust a person's relations, experience, and circumstances in a single instance of processing.
State incorporation of differences does not end with one act of implementation. Write-back forms when the results of processing are preserved as differences available for renewed extraction in the future. Records left by penalties, histories of eligibility formed through assistance, and records of changes made when migration involves changes in household or student registration are concrete forms of this preservation. Changes in identity, relations, and state memory brought about by military service likewise require preservation in a form available for renewed extraction before they can enter later judgments. Records left by border examinations may affect future passage under the corresponding conditions, while compulsory enforcement records may affect credit, loans, travel, and eligibility applications under the rules governing each matter. Write-back gives state incorporation an extent in time: past processing results do not naturally disappear but enter the range of what can later be extracted, becoming conditions that may be seen at the next verification. These materials can have effects later only when the conditions for their extraction in the respective matters are met; one act of implementation does not predetermine every future path.
The temporal tension established by write-back lies in a person's believing a matter has ended while the record remains in the archive. In a future relational field—for example, the next time a person takes up employment, borrows, migrates, leaves the country, enrolls, receives assistance, or undergoes eligibility review—these materials may be extracted again and regain weight in new processing. The power of state incorporation of differences lies not only in present implementation but also in how its results return to the future. Yet what write-back preserves are conditions that can be extracted again, not a comprehensive prediction or predetermination of a person's future positions or path through life.
This temporal continuity comes from later processors being able to extract past results anew in a new relational field, not from the past remaining on a person with the same weight at all times. An assistance record may be used in a later eligibility determination to identify earlier processing; household or student registration changed by migration may also become new materials. Results left by punishment, military service, border examination, and compulsory enforcement are each bounded by the matters for which they are extracted and the scope of the nodes. The same past material does not have the same weight in different relational fields. It may be invoked again at a particular node or remain only within the scope in which it was originally processed. It does not predetermine that every future position will make the same judgment.
Preserving records keeps open paths by which the past can enter the future. It does not mean that the past can directly fix subsequent conclusions like fate. New materials in the present, the questions asked by receiving nodes, and their procedural conditions still change how old results are interpreted and assigned weight. Write-back extends the time during which differences can be processed again; it does not copy the original consequence endlessly into every later position. Nor must the same record become effective in the same way in different relational fields.
In a society of acquaintances, a person can rely on others knowing them: the village knows who they are, the neighbors know where they live, relatives know whom they married, and colleagues know where they work. But in a society of strangers or an urban environment, acquaintance is insufficient when facing unfamiliar institutions such as schools, hospitals, banks, borders, courts, and welfare systems. The person must be identified through documents, numbers, archives, and qualifications. State incorporation of differences produces a form of passability across unfamiliar settings, allowing identity cards, household registration, passports, student registration, social insurance, tax numbers, driving licenses, business licenses, and property registration to be extracted before unfamiliar institutions. Passability here means the processability formed through formatting, registration, certification, and mutual recognition; it cannot be equated with abstract freedom. Whether a person can get things done often depends not on whether they really exist in life but on whether that existence has been entered in state formats and can be mutually recognized by different nodes. State incorporation turns the concrete person within relations among acquaintances into an object that can pass through and be processed by unfamiliar institutions.
The efficacy of a cross-institutionally usable identity always changes with the matter to which its materials refer. It is not a natural attribute of a person, still less the whole person. This passability depends on whether the materials are valid, their scope of application fits, and the processing node has the relevant authority. Student registration can support processing at education-related positions; property registration and social insurance are also used only in the corresponding questions. The same material does not open identical channels at different positions. A cross-institutionally usable identity is often jointly established by several materials at concrete positions, not by one document automatically taking effect in every relational field. An identity card can provide a stable entry point, while household registration, student registration, social insurance, tax numbers, driving licenses, business licenses, or property registration support different matters. Nor can the role of a passport at a border directly replace the materials required at schools, hospitals, banks, courts, or welfare positions. What unfamiliar nodes can process is the verifiable part these materials form within their authority, not a person's complete life. Family responsibilities, community relations, work experience, and concrete circumstances that have not entered the current materials still exist in life. They cannot be subsumed under a cross-institutionally usable identity as a complete self. Materials can have different efficacy at different positions; passability is always bounded by concrete relational fields.
State incorporation of differences not only produces passage but may also leave people stuck at the entry to a procedure. Institutional non-passability is the position formed when differences in lived life cannot be identified, certified, or mutually recognized by state nodes. These people do not lack facts of life: they really do reside, work, have families, experience illness, receive education, and migrate. The problem is that the corresponding facts of life have not been correctly recognized in state formats.
Missing or expired documents, gaps in student-registration or social insurance records, errors in archives or registered matters, and incomplete eligibility materials may temporarily make it difficult for relations already existing in life to enter the corresponding nodes when the current matter actually requires those materials and they have not been lawfully supplemented and corrected. People who become stuck do not lack facts of residence, work, family, or education. Rather, those facts have not yet connected in materials and formats extractable at that position. Border status and recognition of educational qualifications have their own specialized rules and are not merged here into one uniform consequence. [F09]
Institutional non-passability often appears where a concrete chain is cut off. The break may result from insufficient materials, unsuitable formats, unsuccessful certification, or mutual recognition failing to extend. It may also arise from missing or expired documents, gaps in student-registration or social insurance records, errors in archives or registered matters, inconsistencies between registration and life, broken employment relationships, or incomplete eligibility materials. This is not an essential defect of the object itself. The threshold concerns connections between materials and procedures; people who become stuck should not be portrayed as inherently unqualified.
The same person's documents may be usable while their employment materials cannot necessarily connect. A migrant worker's possession of a valid identity card does not mean that employment relations, wage records, and social insurance materials can already support the processing of work-related injury or unpaid wages. Even where the work is real, if the fact of working has not connected to materials capable of establishing the employment relationship, or that relationship has not been formatted, it may be difficult to establish a work-related injury in the relevant matter, and processing may be blocked.
Another concrete problem appears at the point of a child's school admission. Even if the child really lives in the city and the neighborhood organization or landlord knows that fact, where local policy or the specific admission category actually requires the corresponding materials, admission review may be blocked if household registration, a residence permit, a rental filing, or parents' social insurance materials are incomplete or fail to meet the review requirements of that category. After initial school enrollment, the school establishes student records in accordance with the law; for those already registered as students, verification and connection are handled separately under the rules for progression to further schooling or transfer.
Assistance to families likewise depends on verification of specific materials. Even where a family faces real pressures and real difficulties, it may be unable to enter welfare arrangements if the materials cannot establish the relevant facts, income cannot be calculated, or relationships cannot be certified—if income, property, illness, or family relations have not formed verifiable materials. In reviews for the minimum subsistence guarantee, the authorities accepting and reviewing applications also bear corresponding responsibilities to investigate household economic circumstances, check information, and notify applicants of supplementation or correction required. The entire burden of proof is not imposed unilaterally on families in difficulty. Yet these statutory procedures and verification channels do not guarantee that assistance will result. These experiences do not mean that the facts of work, residence, or family hardship themselves do not exist. Concrete life has not yet connected through materials extractable by the corresponding nodes.
Thus passability and non-passability are not fixed boundaries between two kinds of people. They are concrete positions formed by the same object in different matters, materials, and relations among nodes. A person can pass through some nodes yet be cut off at others because of gaps in materials. The protective and exclusionary capacities of state incorporation of differences are connected in this way: the same conditions that allow materials to pass across nodes also leave people who fail to connect outside the channels.
Education nodes turn differences of family, household registration, locality, and eligibility into future positions. Whether a child can enroll is not simply a question of age. In some areas and particular admission years, under local admission policies and categories, application materials may include some of the following: birth or household-registration information, proof of residence, property or rental materials, social insurance or work records, application information, and student-registration information. Vaccination records, school districts, and places are handled under separate concrete rules; they are not required simultaneously everywhere. Enrollment is not a single educational event. It connects family, residence, household registration, employment relations, administrative divisions, and school resources to concrete examination. [F05]
Birth certificates, household registration, residence permits, parents' social insurance, property records or rental filings, school districts, and student registration are not the same kind of material. In admission processing, they refer to family, residence, and educational positions respectively, connecting to school places and subsequent arrangements only after verification. What education forms is not simply an immediate determination of whether a child is of school age. It is a concrete processing path that connects family, residence, and different eligibility materials to the child's future position.
Within social assistance, welfare concerns how hardship is identified through materials, family relations, and eligibility for protection. Reviews for the minimum subsistence guarantee check co-resident household members, household income, and household property under the relevant measures. Severe disability, major or exceptionally serious illness, and the unavoidable expenditure they entail may, under specific conditions, affect applications, separate applications, or income calculations. Medical assistance is handled separately according to categories of recipients, household economic circumstances, medical expenses, and payments under basic medical insurance. Those already recognized as recipients of the minimum subsistence guarantee or as people in extreme hardship receive medical assistance directly; other listed groups are handled through an application mechanism under which the conditions are checked. The requirements of different welfare systems do not form one unified review standard. Their materials and consequences differ from those of education and cannot be replaced by education's admission path. [F08]
The minimum subsistence guarantee, medical insurance, social insurance, disaster relief, disability allowances, housing support, pensions, unemployment relief, and assistance to children are not simply distributions of resources. Under their respective systems, they check different facts of hardship, application materials, entitlement qualifications, or family relations. Assistance programs such as the minimum subsistence guarantee focus on verifying the extent of household economic hardship. Basic medical insurance, basic pensions, and unemployment-insurance benefits within unemployment relief, however, depend under the relevant legal rules on such grounds as lawful insurance enrollment, contribution records, fulfillment of statutory conditions, or involuntary unemployment. They cannot all be made conditional on a determination of household poverty, and requirements for continuity of eligibility apply only within the corresponding systems. Welfare can protect people and also classifies them. If actual pressures in life cannot be converted into compliant application materials and the corresponding eligibility, or if the necessary recognition is not obtained in assistance matters requiring verification of family relations, people may be unable to enter protective arrangements. Thus, while providing protection, welfare nodes also create the possibility of exclusion through eligibility checks.
Military nodes connect bodies to state responsibility. Age, sex, health, household registration, education, political records, eligibility for service, resettlement after discharge, military-family status, military merit, disability, and commemoration of sacrifice are extracted and processed in recruitment, service, resettlement after discharge, commemoration, or compensation and pension provision, as applicable. The military does not merely process individual bodies: it joins bodies, community responsibility, risk, implementing positions, and state memory. The bearing of danger, attribution of responsibility, and posthumous commemoration it handles differ both from education's arrangement of future developmental positions and from welfare's confirmation of eligibility for protection.
Education, welfare, and the military all connect current materials to consequences over longer periods, but each handles different questions. All must proceed through their respective examinations and procedures, with corresponding classification standards and eligibility thresholds. All may produce exclusion through missing materials or unmet conditions, and all may also produce protection. Yet they cannot be portrayed as performing the same function, still less as simply benevolent distribution or indiscriminate exclusion. Protection, eligibility, and responsibility have different entry points. Education is not welfare protection; welfare does not occupy the military's position of responsibility; nor can the military replace schools or welfare nodes in handling their respective matters. None can replace the others' processing relations.
A border is not a natural geographical line endowed with will or personality. It is a high-intensity node where differences incorporated by the state are extracted anew, certified, and put into effect. The intensity of border consequences comes from concentrated processing at nodes; it is neither decided by the geographical line itself nor produced by an abstract state will selecting objects on its own. The same person is a resident locally, and that position does not disappear in border processing. Yet the person may simultaneously become an object of entry and exit, visa, residence, deportation, or examination procedures requiring fresh verification. Differences that usually go unnoticed and appear inconspicuous in everyday local life may, at a border, connect to passage, staying, leaving, deportation, examination, or exclusion. They thus suddenly gain weight and connect to stronger consequences of implementation.
This change of weight comes from materials originally dispersed across different relations in life being brought together again at one position in entry and exit matters. Border inspection personnel select relevant materials for verification according to the current entry or exit matter and the applicable rules. In the border relational field, nationality, documents, passports, visas, language, destination, travel records—including past entry and exit records—kinship relations, property, occupation, and risk judgments may enter the scope of processing. Yet a document or material usable at an internal position may not directly allow passage at a border: it does not thereby cross the border automatically or automatically acquire efficacy. Nor does concentrated processing in any way give the node unlimited authority to judge all differences. Among these materials, nationality, passports, destinations, and travel records relate directly to entry and exit matters; visas are checked according to the applicable status and travel purpose, whereas language, kinship, property, or occupation are extracted and checked only when the current matter specifically requires them.
Both passage and exclusion form after concrete materials are used at implementing positions. Border inspection personnel check documents, visas, existing records, certification results, the current matter, and processing authority, identifying which contents support entry, departure, or stay, and which make examination, deportation, or exclusion possible. Whether connections can be established depends on whether the extracted materials fit the passage matter at hand and whether the processing position has the corresponding authority. It is at concrete relational positions where border personnel, documents, visas, records, certification, and authority work together that boundaries between inside and outside are realized as different enforceable consequences.
The intensity of punishment lies not only in the present but also in whether records enter subsequent matters under concrete rules. Once effective legal instruments enter court enforcement, consumption restriction orders may affect air travel, train seating, and other consumption not necessary for life and work. Whether administrative penalty information is disclosed, preserved, or used in later matters is subject to statutory limits of scope, duration, authority, and purpose. The consequences for local reputation in this book's composite situations cannot be generalized into nationally uniform institutional consequences. Where the corresponding conditions for preservation and use are met, the effects of a penalty can extend beyond the event itself: the record remains in the archive and may later be extracted repeatedly by specific processors. [F11]
A person who is punished may lose certain qualifications; a person subject to compulsory enforcement may face credit restrictions; a criminal record may affect employment, travel, family, and local evaluations. The relevant nodes connect violations of law, debt, risk, and identity records to state coercive power. Civil enforcement records, however, are not equivalent to records of legal violations or criminal records; they must still be handled according to their respective matters. Institutional processing such as state punishment and civil enforcement relies on mechanisms of consequences different from those of ordinary conflict. Ordinary conflict may remain in acquaintances' memories or in reputation within relations among people who know one another, whereas the former can enter archives, records, and future systems of implementation under the corresponding rules.
A present judgment, administrative penalty, or compulsory enforcement actually changes the person's qualifications, actions, or responsibilities in a concrete matter, forming the first consequence. Write-back has already formed when the relevant results are preserved respectively as records of legal violations, criminal records, enforcement records, or other archives available for renewed extraction in the future. It leaves conditions for subsequent processing and need not await a second consequence to count as established. Later, in connection with taking up employment, loans, travel, eligibility applications, border passage, and family and local evaluations, a second consequence may arise only if the relevant records are extracted, interpreted, or assigned weight anew under their respective applicable conditions. Separating the two consequences from the preservation between them makes it possible to see how penalties extend into future relational fields, without treating preservation itself as a second punishment that has already occurred.
Yet later processing cannot automatically repeat the original penalty simply because a record exists. Past materials have continuity, but punishment is by no means an inevitable result automatically produced by records. The formation and continuation of restrictions must still pass through the relevant rules, authority, procedures, and concrete implementing positions. The receiving position must identify the matter referred to by the record, the applicable rules, and its own authority. It cannot treat one record as the sole cause of later experiences or an inevitable fate determining a life. Because archives and implementing nodes enable connections across settings, state punishment is harder than local memory. Yet this hardness comes from institutional relations that permit extraction and implementation. It does not mean that a record has already adjudicated the person's entire future. When the same record is extracted anew in different matters, the intensity and scope of the restrictions it can produce may quite well differ.
The state is not the source of these differences, but it changes how they are preserved, extracted, mutually recognized, and put into effect. The three sources entering state nodes have different mechanisms of formation. Differences produced through national-community formation come from the long-term formation of community relations. Class images are not entities within what society fundamentally is, but low-dimensional images formed by the brutal projection of multiple high-weight differentiating units. Institutional qualifications are shaped by particular organizational relations such as those of schools, hospitals, companies, or neighborhood organizations. State nodes reformat these materials according to materials, rules, and authority, but cannot flatten their mechanisms of generation into one mechanism.
Differences produced through national-community formation first form in languages, place names, shared harm, community boundaries, and experiences of boundaries. When the relevant differences among them are brought into state nodes in the corresponding matters, they take the following distinct formats through the relevant administrative and legal procedures. Languages become official languages, languages of schooling, and examination languages; community boundaries become registration fields, regional institutions, and legal recognition; place names are fixed as administrative divisions; shared harm is organized into commemorative days, teaching materials, museums, and official narratives; experiences of boundaries are distilled into passports, border inspection, nationality, visas, and state borders. This formatting changes how materials are processed, giving them the capacity to be preserved and invoked across settings, but does not make the state the source of nations. Ethnic registration leaves only part of the form of community differences in particular fields; it cannot replace the national community itself. The original formation of language, shared memory, and experiences of boundaries continues outside state formats. State incorporation of differences can connect some differences to administrative divisions, teaching materials, or border inspection, but cannot contain all of a community's relations in one registration.
Classifications, materials, or low-dimensional images formed by class theory are still processed anew after specific personnel, organizations, or institutional procedures bring them into state nodes. When the relevant personnel use these images to classify, this too may produce real consequences. This must be distinguished from checking income, employment relations, housing, property, debt, social insurance, taxation, and assistance eligibility under concrete rules; ordinary processing of materials cannot all be attributed to class theory. In archives, taxation, welfare, education, housing, and judicial procedures, what processors actually extract and format are these concrete differentiating units, connecting them to qualifications and records that can be registered, mutually recognized, and put into effect. This process has not discovered a really existing class. Class does not exist at all, and the consequences of classification produced by adopting an image cannot, in reverse, prove its existence. Institutional processing of real differences and classification based on images can connect within the same procedure, but we must still trace the materials on which each is based, who adopts them, and how they change consequences.
Institutional qualifications, such as those of schools, hospitals, companies, and neighborhood organizations, originally depend on their respective particular organizational relations. Once connected to state nodes, they may acquire the capacity to be processed across regions, institutions, and settings, allowing local certification to produce consequences over a larger space. Yet this extension still depends on the nature of the current matter and the receiving node's authority. Different nodes may not automatically recognize one another's materials, and some qualifications are effective only within a limited scope. The original formation of institutional qualifications does not disappear upon connection to the state, nor can institutionalization at the organizational level be directly equated with state incorporation of differences.
After entering state nodes, differences produced through national-community formation, class images, and institutional qualifications can meet in the same document, archive, or processing of administrative qualifications, yet still cannot replace one another. State incorporation of differences changes the scope these materials can cross, the nodes that extract them, and the consequences of implementation to which they connect. It does not retroactively create their original sources. Only by retaining the differences among these three chains can we explain how state nodes increase the intensity of processing without conflating national communities, low-dimensional class images, and organizations' institutional qualifications as one-dimensional creations of the state.
State relations can protect people and also trap them in positions of non-passability. Resident identity cards can be used where the law specifies or a concrete service genuinely requires proof of identity; student registration records a student's enrollment status under education rules; social insurance provides statutory protection in the separate circumstances of old age, illness, work-related injury, unemployment, and childbirth; courts and other administrative procedures maintain order within their respective authority. [F02a] Documents give people verifiable entry points before unfamiliar institutions; student registration connects children to educational positions; social insurance and assistance give hardships such as illness, unemployment, or old age an opportunity to enter protective procedures. Courts, police, border inspection, and administrative nodes provide order and passage within their respective scopes and existing authority, and can bring some risks into an order of implementation. These protections do not fall abstractly on everyone. Specific personnel form them at particular positions according to materials, rules, authority, and procedures. When documents, student registration, and social insurance materials are checked and recognized, they can give people passage, education, or protection at unfamiliar nodes.
Yet state incorporation of differences is not inherently legitimate. It can protect or exclude, recognize or misread, provide qualifications or create gaps, stabilize order or freeze complex differences. It cannot be written either as worship of the state or as a simple theory of oppression. Where the current matter actually requires the corresponding materials, the same chain may stop before certification, mutual recognition, or implementation if missing documents, archival errors, mismatched household registration, or incomplete eligibility materials have not been lawfully remedied through supplementation or correction. The chain may also be halted when past records are extracted anew and used to impose restrictions in the relevant matters, or when misreading or incorrect handling occurs during actual processing. The person then cannot connect to paths that would otherwise allow passage, enrollment, protection, or processing. Being left outside the threshold does not mean that the person's facts of life do not exist. Concrete life has not yet connected through materials and procedures accessible to the corresponding nodes.
This shows that protection and exclusion are not two unrelated aspects of the state. There is not one state responsible only for protection and another responsible only for exclusion. Rather, the same network of nodes makes different connections in response to different states of materials. Judging the consequences of state incorporation of differences cannot stop at abstract general declarations. It requires a return to concrete processing relations: which materials are seen, which relations are suppressed, which qualifications are connected, and who is left outside the channels at the threshold of material requirements.
It is through stages such as identification, formatting, registration, classification, certification, mutual recognition, allocation and coordination, implementation, and write-back that dispersed differences enter documents, archives, law, administration, education, taxation, welfare, the military, borders, and punishment mechanisms. Depending on the requirements of concrete matters, these stages may interweave, be blocked, or terminate; not every instance of processing passes through the entire chain. Where connections run smoothly, this process gives differences passability across settings; where materials are missing or rules do not fit, it produces institutional non-passability within procedures. Documents, archives, judgments, commemorations, teaching materials, border records, records of sacrifice, administrative divisions, and punishment records retained by state nodes preserve implementation results as materials available for renewed extraction in the future, giving state incorporation of differences an extent in time beyond a single event. Only when these records are retrieved, examined, and assigned weight anew in particular future matters do they again become actual judgments and corresponding consequences.
State nodes thus leave a system of preserved materials available for later extraction. Historicization then takes up these retained materials: in subsequent processes of preservation, interpretation, forgetting, commemoration, and contestation, they may be passed to those who come later and regain weight in possible future concrete relational fields.
[F13] For births and changes in household registration, see Articles 7 and 17–19 of the Regulations on Household Registration of the People's Republic of China. For marriage registration, see Articles 4 and 7–10 of the 2025 Regulations on Marriage Registration. For real-property registration, see Articles 2, 8, and 15–16 of the Interim Regulations on Real Property Registration. For student registration, see Articles 3–7 of Jiao Ji [2025] No. 1. Administrative penalty records are also subject to the procedural and disclosure boundaries of the Administrative Penalty Law of the People's Republic of China.
Related passages: F01
[F12] Proof of identity, student registration, social insurance, court enforcement, and real-property registration enter subsequent matters under their respective specialized rules. See Articles 13–15 of the Resident Identity Card Law of the People's Republic of China; Articles 3–7 of Jiao Ji [2025] No. 1; Articles 4, 58, and 74 of the Social Insurance Law of the People's Republic of China; Articles 5–6 of the consumption restriction provisions; and Articles 27–28 of the Interim Regulations on Real Property Registration.
[F09] For the boundaries of proof and inspection involving resident identity cards, see Articles 13–15 of the Resident Identity Card Law of the People's Republic of China. For establishing and updating student registration, see Articles 6–7 of Jiao Ji [2025] No. 1. For social insurance contribution and entitlement records, see Articles 58 and 74 of the Social Insurance Law of the People's Republic of China. For changes and corrections to household registration, see Articles 17–19 of the Regulations on Household Registration of the People's Republic of China. Corrections to archives are separately governed by the Archives Law and its implementing regulations.
Related passages: F01
[F05] Central legal sources and annual local policies for compulsory-education admission must be used at distinct levels. Articles 11–13 of the Compulsory Education Law of the People's Republic of China establish the framework for enrollment of school-age children and adolescents and local guarantees. Shanghai's Hu Jiao Wei Ji [2023] No. 10, Beijing's Jing Jiao Ji Er [2024] No. 4, the guide for the 2024–2025 school year in Dapeng, Shenzhen, and Yun Jiao Gui Zi [2024] No. 1 of Baiyun, Guangzhou, establish only the material requirements for their respective areas, years, and categories, not a nationally uniform checklist. The Dapeng example follows Parts III–V and VII–IX of the Guide to Applications for First-Year Junior Secondary School Places in Compulsory Education in Dapeng New District for the 2024–2025 School Year (2024-05-30, https://www.dpxq.gov.cn/ztzl/mszt/jypx/tzgg/content/post_11320115.html). Housing materials have different submission paths; social insurance requirements and points are determined by application category. The Baiyun example follows Articles 4–9 of Yun Jiao Gui Zi [2024] No. 1 (https://www.gz.gov.cn/gfxwj/qjgfxwj/byq/qbm/content/post_9630491.html). Stable residence, stable employment, current social insurance contributions, or a child's existing local sixth-grade student registration are different ways of satisfying the corresponding provisions of Article 4. These measures took effect on 2024-05-01 and were repealed on 2025-04-10 by Yun Jiao Gui Zi [2025] No. 1; this book uses them here for the period in which they applied. The two official full texts were rechecked on 2026-09-30.
[F08] This book distinguishes the minimum subsistence guarantee, medical assistance, and basic medical insurance within the relevant jurisdiction in mainland China. For acceptance of applications, co-resident household members, income and property, separate applications by specified persons, deductions for unavoidable expenditure, supplementation and correction, investigation and information checks, and confirmation and payment under the minimum subsistence guarantee, see Articles 2, 4–25, and 38 of the Measures for Review and Confirmation of the Minimum Subsistence Guarantee (Min Fa [2021] No. 57). Materials obtainable through government service platforms are not required to be submitted again; assistance with investigations by villagers' or residents' committees does not mean that neighborhood certification is invariably required. For medical-assistance recipients, household economic circumstances, medical expenses, insurance payments, referrals, and application review, see Parts II–V and VII–VIII of the Opinions of the General Office of the State Council on Improving the Medical Insurance and Assistance System for Major and Exceptionally Serious Diseases (Guo Ban Fa [2021] No. 42). Those already recognized as recipients of the minimum subsistence guarantee or as people in extreme hardship receive medical assistance directly; this does not mean that every expense has already been paid. Basic medical insurance, basic pension insurance, and unemployment insurance each have statutory conditions, with no common prerequisite of a determination of household poverty. See Articles 2, 16, 23–32, and 44–45 of the Social Insurance Law of the People's Republic of China (amended in 2018). For categories of medical treatment outside the province of insurance enrollment, filing and completion of filing at a later stage, referrals, direct settlement, and manual reimbursement, see Parts II–III of Yi Bao Fa [2022] No. 22 and Articles 2–17, 30–37, 43–44, and 57–63 of its attached Operating Procedures for Direct Settlement of Basic Medical Insurance Expenses for Cross-Provincial Medical Treatment; also consult Parts I–IV of Yi Bao Fa [2024] No. 21. These last two documents are limited to the out-of-area medical treatment matters they specify. They cannot support a uniform checklist of materials for all medical and assistance procedures. The place of insurance enrollment, place of treatment, type of insurance, category of treatment, and rules applicable at the time of processing must be checked separately. The existence of statutory channels does not mean that actual results are guaranteed.
[F11] For specific consequences of court enforcement records, see Articles 1, 3–6, and 9 of the Provisions of the Supreme People's Court on Restricting High Consumption and Certain Other Consumption by Persons Subject to Enforcement. For disclosure and processing of administrative penalty information, see Article 48 and the relevant procedural provisions of the Administrative Penalty Law of the People's Republic of China. These legal sources do not support presenting consequences for taking up employment, loans, border passage, and local reputation as uniform across all records.