9520133 Parris With the transition from a command to a marketized economy in China, a growing class of private and individual business operators has emerged in both the rural and urban areas. This Research Planning Grant study seeks to reconstruct the ways that private business owners in china conceptualize citizenship and their own roles and competencies as citizens through the use of Q-methodology. Citizenship is defined as the privileges and duties attached to full membership in the community. Private business owner refers to those individuals whose income is largely (though not wholly) dependent on self employment in industrial or commercial spheres and who define themselves as private or individual entrepreneurs. Two stages of research will be undertaken. The first stage is an intensive ethnographic examination of the current discourse on citizenship among private and individual entrepreneurs. This stage involves semi- structured interviews and careful analysis of documentary resources, including newspapers, journals, books and manuscripts. This ethnographic research forms the basis for Q-sort method which allows the researcher to model selected entrepreneurs reactions to a set of statements about citizenship. With this methodology the researcher explores the subjective understanding of selected individuals in a way that is constrained by statistical results. While the initial need is for description and definition, the long term goal is an unfolding comparative study on citizenship and business ownership that attempts to establish the role of political culture in the process of democratization. ***