English integrated edition · v003
Chapter 30. The State: Identification, Registration, Certification, Implementation, and Write-Back
The state is often spoken of as a person: it sees, decides, punishes, and also protects. This way of writing saves effort, but it readily leads readers to imagine the state as an enormous subject standing outside society, as though it could see all people and facts clearly at once and then issue commands through a single will. The actual procedures for obtaining official documents, school admission, labor matters, medical care, adjudication, and passage do not operate this way.
The combination of materials depends on the particular matter, the area concerned, and the statutory eligibility conditions; the same checklist is not required in every situation. The public-security systems and document-production procedures involved in obtaining an identity card use materials such as birth certificates, household registration, photographs, addresses, or family relations according to the circumstances. In different areas, a child's school admission may involve application and review using materials such as household registration, residence permits, parents' social insurance, or rental filing. Only after admission and initial enrollment is a student-registration file established. Carrying forward an existing student registration when progressing to another level of schooling or transferring is a separate matter.
Labor and medical events likewise pass through their own concrete stages. After a worker is injured, confirming the employment relationship, obtaining medical records, applying for a determination of work-related injury or the corresponding work-capacity appraisal, and checking social-insurance contributions and workplace information belong to different stages of determination, verification of materials, or processing; they cannot be conflated into a single step. When an elder seeks medical care away from home, insurance-enrollment information, medical records, and itemized expenses must be connected to reimbursement nodes according to the relevant category of treatment. Filing or referral formalities are handled under the rules that actually apply; different categories of treatment cannot uniformly be required to supply the same set of materials.
In these events, the state's role is jointly formed through concrete agencies, personnel, documents, registration systems, certification procedures, and implementing nodes. This does not redefine the state as a "network" conceived as the sole underlying reality, nor does it deny the reality of state organizations and their procedures. Precisely because service-counter personnel can accept or reject materials, and nodes of schools, hospitals, courts, public security, communities, borders, taxation, social insurance, and assistance can form, preserve, and retrieve records, relevant determinations can become qualifications, restrictions, protection, penalties, or consequences of implementation. The state is not an enormous personality, but the consequences formed through these organizations and procedures have real and often very high intensity.
In concrete events, personnel or the corresponding procedures may extract various differences anew. These include birthplace, household registration, nationality, age, sex, marriage, and ethnic registration, as well as educational qualifications, occupation, tax records, social insurance contributions, records of legal violations, medical records, and property. Eligibility for military service, facts of residence, migration routes, eligibility for assistance, educational eligibility, and judicial status may likewise be retrieved in such procedures. Analysis need not begin by debating whether the state is a subject. More important is to distinguish each action along the procedures: who identifies differences in life, who registers materials, who certifies their validity, how different nodes achieve mutual recognition, how determinations enter implementation, and who then preserves the results for renewed retrieval in future events.
Many differences already exist before state agencies intervene. Family, locality, nation, market, illness, migration, marriage, debt, labor, and conflict are not created out of nothing by registration or administrative procedures. Interactions with neighbors and landlords and in food markets can confirm that someone lives here. A child's birth, a father's unpaid wages, and an elder's illness are likewise, first of all, things that have already happened in life. When these matters enter the relevant service counters, personnel and procedures extract particular differences from them. The fact of residence may be entered into household registration, a residence permit, rental filing, address registration, or a community certificate; the fact of birth may be entered into a birth certificate, household registration, guardianship relations, vaccination records, and student-registration materials.
This recasting involves several actions that must not be conflated. Service-counter personnel, reviewers, or case handlers first extract from facts of life differences relevant to the current event: this is identification. Only when the content enters forms, certificates, files, or databases does it become registration. Authorized nodes judge, according to materials and procedures, whether an identity, relation, or qualification can be established: this is certification. Only when the corresponding personnel further put certification or adjudication into effect as school admission, reimbursement, assistance, penalties, permission to pass, or restrictions does it enter implementation. Registration is not a neutral transcription of life in its entirety. Facts that do not fit the fields may be downweighted, and materials may be cut off, misread, omitted from registration, or rejected. The distinctive role of state procedures is to turn some differences in life into formats that subsequent nodes can read and act on with consequences, not to create all differences.
The concentration of data at state nodes does not mean that information is complete. Databases can preserve only content accepted by the fields as designed, while personnel remain limited by access permissions, the timing of updates, and correction procedures. Centralized preservation can improve the capacity for connection across nodes, but it may also amplify erroneous records. Analysts must also trace whether synchronization and correction actually occur.
The mother does casual work in a restaurant and rushes back to their rented home in the afternoon to pick up the child. Behind her is a family of workers from elsewhere, facing pressure at multiple nodes at once: rent is due at the end of the month, and a loan from relatives has not yet been repaid; the father works on a construction site away from home, and his wages are two months overdue; the child has reached school age, and local policy may require some materials concerning residence, social insurance, or renting, while progression to another level of schooling or transfer may also involve existing student-registration materials; the elder's medical records are at the hospital in the county town back home, while medical-insurance enrollment remains in the home locality. These are not abstract labels of poverty. They are the materials, qualifications, nodes, and time pressures that this family faces simultaneously along multiple procedural chains.
The mother occupies the position of an actor who prepares, submits, explains, supplements, and corrects materials. At the same time, she bears the consequences when the results of these procedures come to bear on the family's cash flow and care arrangements. Whether she has signed a contract, whether social-insurance records have been established, whether her working hours can be adjusted, and whether taking leave reduces her income change her ability to visit service counters, prepare, supplement, and correct materials, and care for family members.
Labor or care that has already occurred in life does not automatically bring the corresponding consequences within state procedures. Care among family members, traces of responsibility, and past support, as well as local recognition formed through landlords, neighbors, the community, and people from the same place of origin, certainly play their roles before or outside connection to state procedures. State procedures cannot replace family responsibility or local recognition, but they can change the positions from which family members obtain qualifications, assistance, and consequences of implementation.
The same mechanism—“the existence of a fact does not mean that the consequences have materialized”—also operates in a child's school-admission procedure. The child does live here; that is a fact of everyday life, but such a fact does not automatically amount to eligibility for admission. In concrete procedures, admission reviews for particular areas or years may require rental materials issued by the landlord, community certificates, or the parents' residence and social-insurance records. Personnel reviewing applications judge whether to accept an admission application on the basis of the relevant materials. Under the Measures for the Administration of Student Registration in Primary and Secondary Schools as revised in 2025, after initial enrollment formalities have been completed, the school collects and enters student-registration information using the student's valid identity document and establishes a student-registration file within two months, updating it promptly at start-of-term reporting and after transfers [F02]. Materials concerning renting, residence, or social insurance are requirements for admission review in particular areas, not a nationally uniform checklist for establishing student registration. Once a student registration has been established, the family may take this record into account again in later migration, changes of rental accommodation, and work arrangements. If materials are not accepted at a review node, the child may be unable to attend school smoothly in the locality, and the resulting consequences may also prompt changes to the family's care and work arrangements.
The father did the work. In law, an employment relationship is established from the day actual employment begins. Yet in a dispute concerning a particular construction site, whether the relationship between a worker and the party engaging the worker constitutes an employment relationship must still be verified against the concrete relations and materials. In unpaid-wage disputes requiring inspection, arbitration, or adjudication, the relevant personnel verify these facts and relations on the evidence and deal with the corresponding claims for payment. In concrete procedures, contracts, wage records, and workplace information can serve as proof of actual labor; testimony from coworkers or others with knowledge of the matter may also become evidence. Which evidence is needed must be determined according to the dispute and the relevant procedure; this must not be understood to mean that every item is indispensable. Whether labor inspectors accept the materials, whether an arbitration body or court determines that an employment relationship exists and issues a ruling, and whether enforcement personnel initiate and complete enforcement when obligations remain unfulfilled are distinct stages, not a single path that every case must follow in sequence. [F04]
Reimbursement for the elder's medical expenses likewise depends on connections between concrete nodes. The elder is indeed ill, and hospital personnel produce medical records and itemized expenses. Yet these materials must still connect with insurance-enrollment information and the applicable materials for out-of-area treatment before reimbursement can be completed. Take direct settlement for cross-provincial medical treatment in mainland China: the administering agencies and networked medical institutions at the place of treatment upload and process expense information according to their respective responsibilities. The information is transmitted through the national information platform to the place of insurance enrollment, where payments from insurance funds and the amount personally payable are calculated under the applicable policies. The resulting payment information is then sent back to the networked institution. Family members help present proof of insurance enrollment and prepare the filing or referral materials actually required for the category of treatment. Filing can be completed under the rules before discharge settlement; out-of-area emergency rescue treatment is treated as already filed. At settlement, only the personal share of expenses needs to be paid under the rules. If direct settlement is unavailable for some reason, an application for manual reimbursement can be made under the rules of the place of insurance enrollment. Approval of eligibility does not mean that expenses have already been settled. Breaks at any of these stages may still affect who accompanies the elder, who advances payment, who takes leave, and who bears the pressure of care; these arrangements cannot be presented as a fixed procedure followed in every area. [F08]
The multiple procedural chains facing the family thus affect one another, but they cannot be compressed into a unified process automatically advanced by “the state.” What matters for recognition that can be put into effect is not only whether someone knows the facts, but also whether materials can be accepted, qualifications certified, and mutual recognition achieved between nodes, and whether someone initiates and completes implementation. If rent payments or the connections between materials are interrupted, residence registration, admission applications and subsequent student-registration processing, and eligibility for assistance may also affect one another within certain procedures.
Local recognition can make a person known among neighbors; family recognition can make a person subject to demands or afford them protection within kinship relations; recognition within a national community comes from the intergenerational write-back of long-term interaction, shared memory, shared harm, shared protection, responsibility, and experiences of boundaries. State registration cannot create this kind of national community, nor can it make a registration field equivalent to an actually existing national community. What distinguishes state procedures is that personnel can enter identified differences into records, certification nodes can judge whether materials or qualifications are valid, and implementing personnel may turn the results into school admission, reimbursement, assistance, penalties, permission to pass, or restrictions.
In concrete operation, recognition that can be put into effect involves distinct levels such as acceptance, certification, mutual recognition, and implementation. These must not be conflated, nor do they mean that every matter must follow the entire four-step path in a fixed order. Application personnel seeing a child's residence materials does not mean that eligibility for admission has been certified; labor inspectors accepting unpaid-wage materials does not mean that a ruling has been issued; a ruling being issued does not mean that enforcement will necessarily be completed. State recognition appears “harder” because certain determinations can connect to coercive force and chains of implementation, directly changing the qualifications and action spaces of those concerned, not because it has greater ontological reality than family, local, or national-community recognition. Where connections between different nodes are involved, the crucial question is whether mutual recognition can be achieved. A fact already recognized at one node may still encounter a failure of mutual recognition at another.
V. Authority to Extract Differences, Certification Authority, and Authority to Initiate Implementation within the State
Differences do not turn into institutional consequences on their own. In the concrete operation of organizational power, nodes differ in the actions and authority they control: service-counter personnel can accept materials but do not necessarily have authority to make a final certification; content uploaded to a database by personnel is not necessarily mutually recognized at another node; even when an arbitration body or a court has produced a legally effective instrument, if its obligations remain unfulfilled, whether enforcement can lawfully be initiated and completed will in turn affect whether wages or compensation are actually received. Authority to extract differences, register, certify, supplement and correct, upload, refuse, and initiate implementation must not be conflated. Describing all of this as “the state decides” conceals breaks in procedures and the positions at which responsibility lies.
These differences in power appear in specific divisions among legal sources. In the legal sources cited in this book concerning procedures for school admission, student registration, determination of work-related injury, labor arbitration, civil litigation, and administrative reconsideration, the relevant personnel accept, extract, preserve, or judge particular materials only within their respective matters and authority. The specific authority to extract differences at public-security, community, social-insurance, border-inspection, civil-affairs, taxation, and other service counters must still be established separately under their own legal sources; it cannot all be established by the sources just mentioned. Who can extract what is not an ordinary judgment of fact but power actually allocated within procedures. [F06a]
As concrete procedures unfold, the difficulties confronting a family of workers from elsewhere often do not lie in a complete absence of facts. The child lives here, the father did the work, the elder has medical records, and the mother works at the restaurant every day. The problem is whether materials supplied by landlords, coworkers, family members, or workplace personnel can be accepted at a service counter, supplemented and corrected as required, certified by authorized personnel, and read by subsequent nodes. When facts of life cannot readily be turned into usable materials, a person may exist in reality yet lack a position from which to initiate consequences within a particular institutional procedure.
Whether materials can be extracted, recognized, and corrected further involves the actual allocation of resources and time. The capacity for centralization at state nodes includes arranging these conditions: budgets determine how many people can handle applications, how soon a review can take place, and where entry points for supplementation and correction are available, while appointments and supervision affect the positions at which discretion lies. These arrangements do indeed change whether materials can be extracted, recognized, and corrected. Yet the words "the state" cannot directly yield an account of all responsibility.
Understanding this actual allocation also requires examining whether ownership and control over use coincide. The nominal owner of equipment, data, or an account is not necessarily the person who decides who can use it, who can change it, and who can benefit from it. Actual control may be shared among managers, authorizers, technical personnel, or those allocating resources. Only by separating nominal title, control, use, benefit, and the capacity to correct can we avoid portraying ownership as a subject that acts on its own.
The analysis of responsibility must therefore examine concrete control, knowledge, and capacities for correction. When institutional personnel maintain arrangements despite knowing their accumulated consequences, responsibility must be judged in relation to their actual capacities. People who can raise objections, stop passing matters on, initiate review, or adjust resources are in a different situation from those who merely receive results and have no corrective authority. Allocating responsibility requires preserving distinctions between levels of authority, rather than treating everyone alike because they share an organizational name.
Bringing facts of life into procedures of registration, certification, and implementation often requires time, travel, filling out forms, preserving proof, operating digital systems, and repeated supplementation and correction. Getting facts of life before those who certify them already entails real costs. A child's admission procedure involves not only eligibility and whether applicants can understand application requirements, but also whether parents can take leave to visit service counters and whether the landlord supplies filing materials. If the mother cannot take leave, she may miss the time for submitting materials; a landlord unwilling to supply them may make it difficult for the real fact of residence to enter the application.
Thresholds formed by processing costs and concrete obstacles also arise when seeking medical benefits and labor rights. Reimbursement for the elder involves not only illness and the medical-insurance relationship, but also whether family members can help complete the filing or referral formalities actually needed for this episode of care and organize the itemized expenses. Even where offline channels such as service counters are provided under the rules, if the elder cannot operate digital systems, the availability of a family member to act on the elder's behalf may still affect arrangements for processing. The existence of offline counters does not automatically eliminate the costs of travel, leave from work, and waiting. For the facts of unpaid wages to enter a determination procedure, it matters whether the father can establish the workplace information, obtain coworkers' testimony, and preserve wage records. If wage records have not been preserved, the person concerned may have to provide supplementary evidence repeatedly.
The costs of recognition therefore do not fall equally on everyone. These concrete difficulties do not prove that a class entity is acting behind the scenes. They show how real differentiating units, such as working hours, income, housing, digital skills, caregiving responsibilities, resources for providing proof, and available exits, change people's ability to enter procedures. The more elaborate the materials and procedures, the more likely it is that the costs of recognition become a new filtering mechanism.
An explanation of the state must further distinguish the existence of rules from the capacity to handle matters. A law or procedure providing an entry point for review does not mean that the person concerned is certain to obtain materials, time, and personnel support, nor that the responsible position has sufficient resources to complete a correction. The distance between a formal entry point and an actual one changes whether rights can enter real consequences.
The initial formation of a record, its becoming readable at other nodes, mutual recognition, and eventual implementation are distinct stages of judgment and handling. Not every matter necessarily passes through all of them in sequence. After hospital personnel confirm an illness and produce medical records, the related reimbursement materials may still be rejected at medical-insurance review nodes; certificates issued by community personnel may not receive mutual recognition from school reviewers. In law, an employment relationship is established from the day actual employment begins. Yet when a particular dispute enters procedures such as inspection, arbitration, or litigation, whether the relationship qualifies as an employment relationship must still be verified against the available materials. The parties do not necessarily have to pass through inspection, arbitration, litigation, and enforcement one by one. Even after a court has issued a judgment, the result may not materialize because enforcement personnel have not yet found the conditions that would allow enforcement. For a judgment made within a limited scope to produce wider consequences, connections, transfers, and mutual recognition between nodes are required. Materials valid at a service counter may, after entering a database, be unusable at another node because of problems with fields, permissions, or connections. The existence of a record does not mean that subsequent personnel can read it in the current event or will assign it the same weight. State organizations have real capacities, but they cannot be imagined as a unified brain that knows everything, synchronizes everything, and automatically completes everything.
The difficulties of a family of workers from elsewhere often arise at the seams between these stages. The landlord, community, and neighbors know that the family lives here, yet school review may still require a different set of acceptable materials; the hospital back home has preserved medical records, yet personnel at out-of-area reimbursement nodes may still require supplementation and correction; coworkers and the labor contractor know that the father did the work, yet inspection, arbitration, or adjudication nodes must still verify the employment relationship on the basis of the usable materials actually accepted in the case. These situations show that the existence of a record does not necessarily produce the expected consequences. When contrary materials, erroneous records, or failures of mutual recognition change the concrete result of handling, the explanation that “the existence of a record automatically produces consequences” must be revised.
The same centralized policy may be implemented differently at different nodes through similar paths of relaying. Requirements from above must pass through the relevant applicable channels, such as notices, database fields, assessments, and personnel training, to reach the end of the chain gradually; not every requirement must pass through every channel. In this process, intermediate positions can delay, interpret, resist, or selectively pass things on. Analysis therefore needs to compare how commands are relayed across nodes, identify which positions have the capacity to review, revoke, or correct, and examine which consequences are rewritten in the course of being passed on.
Stable state capacity across regions and departments must be demonstrated through repeated acts of mutual recognition and implementation. A document's being recognized in one place does not establish that all nodes can read it. Nor does an order from above being carried out in several places erase resistance, delays, and exceptions elsewhere. Judgments of capacity at the macro level should specify regions, institutions, periods, and visible counterexamples. Formal unity does not guarantee uniform implementation either. The same forms and rules may produce differences when they enter different regions, depending on staffing, budgets, training, local materials, and supervision from above. State capacity at the macro level requires support from these concrete configurations; a uniform format cannot be directly equated with uniform consequences.
The state cannot be portrayed as a machine of pure oppression. Administration of the minimum subsistence guarantee may enable eligible applicants to obtain support for living. Assistance review can admit those who meet the conditions, but it may also reject those unable to provide proof. Basic medical insurance, medical assistance, and the personnel administering them can handle illness and expenses under their respective rules. Medical-insurance review can allow expenses to enter reimbursement, but it may also refuse to accept them because materials fail to connect.
Schools connect educational eligibility through admission and student-registration rules. Courts handle debt or labor disputes through adjudication and enforcement procedures. They can enforce rights, but evidence, procedural costs, or enforcement conditions may also leave those concerned unable to obtain a result. These procedures belong to different systems. They do not constitute a set of rules through which a single agency uniformly connects education, employment, passage, and welfare. These forms of protection are not the automatic benevolence of an abstract institution; they are results achieved by concrete personnel working with materials, authority, and procedures. [F05e]
Border-inspection personnel may permit or restrict passage according to documents, existing records, and judgments of risk. Protection and exclusion through state power may come from the same set of capacities. Unified certification can allow rights to travel across regions, but it may also cause people who could not enter the format to be rejected in several places. Centralized implementation can deliver assistance, and it can also amplify erroneous determinations. Analysts must trace concrete uses and entry points for correction; they cannot infer a single character directly from the concentration of capacity.
Protection and exclusion are not two unrelated states, but different consequences produced for different materials and positions by the same chain of identification, certification, and implementation. Analysis cannot stop at blanket judgments such as "the state is good" or "the state is bad." What actually needs tracing is which staff member extracted which differences, which materials were accepted or rejected, at which node mutual recognition broke down, who gained entry to eligibility, and who was excluded from the chain of implementation. The reality of state consequences lies precisely in these locatable acts of admission, refusal, protection, restriction, and implementation, not in the benevolence or malice of some abstract personality.
In particular local systems—such as applications for first-year junior secondary school places in Dapeng New District, Shenzhen, for the 2024–2025 school year, and points-based admission for children accompanying people who have moved to Guangzhou under Baiyun District's 2024 measures—applicants submit some of the materials concerning housing, residence, social insurance, or work according to their category, and the relevant departments accept and review them under that year's procedures. Review of materials, determination of eligibility and points, admission, and enrollment formalities each have their corresponding stages. The establishment, transfer, and preservation of student registration are handled separately under the student-registration rules applicable at the time of processing. The particular combinations of materials and review procedures belong to specific institutional settings. They must not be extended into a nationally uniform checklist, nor may concrete cases be expanded into universal rules. [F05f]
In an unpaid-wage event, the father, coworkers, workplace personnel, and relevant records supply materials on labor and wages. Labor inspectors decide whether to accept them, and an arbitration body or court judges the employment relationship and the unpaid-wage claim under the relevant procedure. When the obligations under a legally effective instrument remain unfulfilled and the matter lawfully enters enforcement, enforcement personnel then handle it to put the consequences into effect. In an illness event, hospital personnel produce medical records and itemized expenses, while family members prepare proof of insurance enrollment and referral or filing materials according to the actual category of treatment. Administering agencies at the place of insurance enrollment and the place of treatment check the scope of covered expenses and policies on cost sharing under their respective rules. They connect with networked hospitals through information systems to achieve direct settlement or, when direct settlement is unavailable, proceed to manual review and reimbursement. Each chain may branch, break off, or require supplementation and correction; they cannot be presented as fixed, inevitable linear sequences.
Records formed through penalties, judgments, student registration, reimbursement, or border processing must be retrieved again by authorized personnel in subsequent relevant events before they can change judgments concerning credit, employment, passage, loans, administrative permits, or other matters. A record does not cross all domains on its own, nor does the past automatically determine the present. Whether a record can lead to new consequences depends on whether it is still preserved, whether subsequent nodes have authority to read it, and whether personnel extract it in the current event. Contrary materials or supplementation and correction may also change its original weight.
When centralized arrangements produce long-term consequences, responsibility is still allocated along concrete paths. Participants who design rules, allocate resources, reject objections, maintain records, and initiate implementation may differ in capacity and in how much they know. Those carrying out implementation at the end of the chain, those authorizing it from above, and those with review authority cannot all be treated alike. Judgments of state incorporation of differences at the macro level must compare whether these positions recur across several events and retain materials concerning resistance, exceptions, and failures.
Concrete procedures for registration, review, adjudication, and implementation not only preserve existing differences; they may also form new institutional records. In the legal sources cited in this book concerning procedures for school admission and student registration, labor, work-related injuries, administrative penalties, and civil litigation, household-registration or residence materials, student registration, employment relationships, determinations of work-related injury, and penalty and adjudication records can be formed under their respective rules and may be extracted in subsequent matters that have a legal basis for doing so. Later uses of medical-insurance, assistance, or passage records must still be checked separately against the specific systems concerned. This is the limited meaning of "state formatting produces new differentiating units." It does not mean that the state creates the whole of lived reality, or that all differentiating units originate in the state. [F07]
Understanding the long-term effects of arrangements for state incorporation of differences requires distinguishing three temporal levels: immediate consequences, the formation of write-back, and the content of write-back taking effect again. A concrete penalty or permission first changes the person's position in the present. Yet an immediate consequence does not mean that write-back has already formed. Once personnel or procedures preserve a handling result as a difference available for renewed extraction in the future—for example, by entering it in a file or database—write-back has already formed. Nor does preservation that forms write-back mean that its content has already taken effect again in a subsequent situation.
Whether these preserved contents take effect later still depends on the concrete event. Records established by student-registration personnel may be retrieved anew in family migration or later educational events; arbitration or adjudication records may be extracted in related enforcement or risk judgments; handling results formed by reimbursement personnel may change the family's later arrangements for care and advancing payment; and records formed by border-inspection personnel may be consulted anew by subsequent personnel acting within their authority in future events of passage. These are conditional consequences. When not being retrieved, records can ordinarily remain silent; they do not automatically take effect across domains. Only when subsequent events such as school admission, migration, work, assistance, medical insurance, loans, leaving the country, litigation, or administrative approval prompt the relevant personnel or procedures to retrieve them anew do past handling results gain weight in the present. A historical index is not an automatic continuation of the past; it is the re-entry of preserved differences into the present through concrete materials, personnel, and procedures. How a record is interpreted, whether contrary materials are accepted, whether erroneous registration can be supplemented and corrected, and whether different nodes achieve mutual recognition may all change its weight.
Once specific personnel or the corresponding procedures preserve the results of present supplementation and correction, refusal, or new determinations as differences available for renewed extraction in the future, new write-back has already formed. Neither existing preserved records nor newly added write-back takes effect automatically merely because it is preserved. Only when personnel or procedures retrieve, interpret, or assign weight to it anew in subsequent events does its content take effect again. Immediate consequences, the formation of write-back, and the content of write-back taking effect again must be kept distinct so that the timing and distribution of corrective capacity can be accurately identified and concrete responsibility borne at the corresponding stages.
The state is often compressed into several fixed images. The image of a single personality may highlight centralized commands or coercive consequences, at the cost of hiding different agencies, personnel, powers, procedures, and breaks in mutual recognition behind one will. Interpreters who adopt the image of a machine of pure oppression can extract coercion, exclusion, and punishment, yet may have no room for assistance, protection, adjudication, public services, and the enforcement of rights.
The image of all-powerful order treats registration as accurate knowledge and adjudication as completed enforcement, thus overlooking misregistration, omissions from registration, incorrect registration, costs associated with materials, and enforcement failures. As for the image of a single neutral institution, interpreters who adopt it may see only uniform procedural forms. The ways personnel extract differences, disparities in authority, as well as misregistration, omissions from registration, costs associated with materials, and differences in implementation recede beyond the frame; institutional biases and biases of power are also concealed.
Interpreters who adopt class theory can extract real differentiating units such as labor, wages, income, housing, property, debt, resources, risk, available exits, relations of domination, and certain institutional biases. The explanatory power within a limited scope formed through this process of extraction, weight assignment, connection, and compression does not prove that class entities exist within any limited scope. Class entities do not exist, and class theory is not an ordinary limited Model A or Model B; it belongs to Model C in its total-image-subsumption direction. It elevates a set of differences subjected to low-dimensional compression, projection, and naming into society itself, thereby subsuming other valid explanations. The state is not an instrument of implementation for a class entity. Class theory and interpreters who adopt it cannot demote the concrete chains of identification, registration, certification, mutual recognition, implementation, and write-back to subordinate materials.
State registration likewise cannot create or replace national communities. The reality of a national community comes from long-term interaction, multiple layers of relaying, language, rites and customs, shared memory, shared harm, shared protection, demands of responsibility, experiences of boundaries, and intergenerational write-back. Registration agencies can create ethnic-category fields and change members' institutional positions, but fields alone cannot manufacture these interactions, memories, and responsibilities. Nor can family, locality, nation, market, or society be subsumed by state procedures. Social Differentiation Network Theory is used to trace how concrete differences enter consequences; it cannot, in turn, be elevated into another single entity posited as what the state fundamentally is, or another total image of it.
Understanding the state does not consist in choosing an essence for it from among a subject, a machine, an institution, or a class instrument. It consists in returning to the examination of concrete events such as school admission, assistance, medical insurance, unpaid wages, litigation, border passage, household-registration transfers, document applications, and the enforcement of penalties. Each of these events involves different materials and procedures; the word "state" cannot say everything about them. The real consequences produced by state organizations and procedures must always be explained in terms of personnel, materials, qualifications, restrictions, and implementation.
These mechanisms do not follow one fixed path. Different events involve different differentiating units and relational chains entering into consequences, and no node can be presumed always to matter most. In school-admission events, for example, one must examine residence and application materials in the admission review concerned, how student registration is established after initial enrollment, and how existing student-registration materials are extracted in later events such as progression to another level of schooling or transfer. In unpaid-wage events, one needs to trace whether an employment relationship exists, wage records, inspection, adjudication, and enforcement; not every case must pass through all the relevant procedures. In medical-insurance events, one can examine medical records, medical-insurance relations, expense materials, and reimbursement processing. In border events, one must locate documents, the purpose of passage, existing records, and personnel's judgments.
How concrete consequences are generated must be explained through the individual stages of procedural chains: which staff member identifies and extracts differentiating units at a particular service counter or in a particular setting, and into which documents, systems, or records they are registered; which node holds certification authority, and whether authorized nodes recognize or reject the materials; where nodes achieve mutual recognition and where connections break; and, after an award or decision has been made, who initiates implementation and who bears the costs and consequences when implementation falls short. In this process, present consequences of implementation do not require subsequent write-back as a precondition. As soon as handling results are preserved by documents, archives, systems, or the relevant relations that carry them as differences available for renewed extraction in the future, write-back has formed. If old records are retrieved anew and take effect again later, the specific position, statutory authority, and retrieval conditions of those retrieving them must be made clear. The formation of write-back and its later renewed effect must not be conflated.
If incorrect registration, omissions from registration, or mistaken recognition go uncorrected, one must continue to trace the stage at which materials were not accepted, how authorized personnel handled them, and whether changes reached subsequent nodes. Failure to correct cannot be explained by a vague appeal to the state's will. In concrete handling, the parties' submission of supplementary or corrected materials, presentation of contrary materials, or failures of mutual recognition between nodes may all force an existing explanation to be revised. These tests must be grounded in traceable relational chains. Which materials constitute valid counterexamples, and which inference they require to be revised, must still be assessed against the explanation's originally claimed scope of application. Acknowledging these differences and limits in agencies, procedures, materials, and implementation shows that state procedures are indeed complex, but it by no means cancels judgment. On the contrary, the existence of omissions and counterexamples keeps open entry points for calibrating and revising explanations.
Only when complexity is used to cancel valid comparison, placing valid explanations, limited explanations, erroneous explanations, and junk explanations on the same level, does one enter Model C's direction of erasing distinctions between explanations. The other direction elevates the image of a single personality, a machine of pure oppression, all-powerful order, or the total class image into the state and even society itself, subsuming other chains under a total image. These two mechanisms move in opposite directions, yet both destroy comparison, revision, and calibration. Extracting some phenomena through a fixed image does not thereby give an interpreter an adequate explanation. Whatever explanatory power within a limited scope can be established still comes from real differentiating units and the processes of extraction, weight assignment, connection, and compression applied to them. It cannot be attributed to the image, still less used to elevate that image into society itself. A healthy path of understanding, by contrast, remains outside Model C precisely because, while acknowledging complexity, limits, omissions, and counterexamples, it preserves comparison between different explanations, provisional judgment, and revision.
Analysis of state mechanisms must therefore continually preserve the conditionality of institutional settings. The real consequences of state organizations and procedures do not make the state the single underlying reality that encompasses all of society. The boundaries of family, locality, nation, market, and society itself must not be subsumed under state categories. As concrete relational chains unfold through materials, qualifications, and procedures, counterexamples always retain an entry point for revising explanations.
[F04] Employment relationships, wage payments, arbitration, litigation, and court enforcement belong to different procedures. See Articles 7, 10, and 30 of the Labor Contract Law of the People's Republic of China (amended in 2012); Articles 2, 4–6, 9, and 27–51 of the Labor Dispute Mediation and Arbitration Law of the People's Republic of China; and Articles 66–75, 235, 247, and 250–255 of the Civil Procedure Law of the People's Republic of China (amended in 2023). Whether witness materials can be admitted and enforcement completed still depends on the concrete case and statutory conditions.
[F06a] For review of admission materials, see Note F05; for student-registration administration, see Note F02. For acceptance of materials, investigation and verification, decisions, and preservation in determinations of work-related injury, see Articles 6–12 and 17–24 of the Measures for the Determination of Work-Related Injuries. For procedures such as labor arbitration, civil litigation, and administrative reconsideration, see Note F06. Each legal source supports only the procedures and powers within its own scope. Rules on work-capacity appraisal must not substitute for the legal basis for determining work-related injury, nor may these sources be used to infer the full authority to extract differences at other service counters.
[F05e] See Notes F05, F06, and F08; they are used here only within the jurisdiction, period, procedures, and material scope expressly stated in each note.
[F05f] See Note F05; it is used here only within the jurisdiction, period, procedures, and material scope expressly stated in that note.
[F07] Records of admission and student registration, labor and work-related injuries, administrative penalties, and civil litigation are formed within their respective systems. See Articles 3–7 of the Measures for the Administration of Student Registration in Primary and Secondary Schools, Jiao Ji [2025] No. 1; Articles 4–25 of the Measures for the Determination of Work-Related Injuries; Articles 44–67 of the Administrative Penalty Law of the People's Republic of China; and Articles 66–75 and the enforcement part of the Civil Procedure Law of the People's Republic of China. Subsequent retrieval still requires a separate legal basis.