On the edge between the people and the population: Ethnographic research on the minimum livelihood guarantee

China Quarterly

Volumn , Issue 201, 2010, Pages 20-37

  Cho, Mun Young ^a  

^a STANFORD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

GOVERNMENT; POVERTY ALLEVIATION; SOCIALISM; URBAN PLANNING; URBAN POLICY; URBAN POPULATION;

CHINA; HARBIN; HEILONGJIANG;

EID: 77954516803     PISSN: 03057410     EISSN: 14682648     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0305741009991056     Document Type: Article

References (61)

1. In contemporary China, "community" (shequ) refers to both the lowest-level division of local urban government and the geographical locale, or neighbourhood, covered by this administration. I will use the capital "C" to distinguish the government office from the neighbourhood covered by its administration.
2. In this article, except for large areas such as Harbin and Hadong, all names of places are pseudonyms. Likewise, all names of persons are pseudonyms.
3. Internal materials from the Street Office and the police office in Hadong.
4. Although dibao was launched in Harbin in 1997, its complete implementation started in 2001. The number of dibao recipients in Harbin reached its peak (307, 003) in 2002 and subsequently decreased to 202, 556 by 2006. National statistics for dibao do not necessarily show the same rapid decrease. The total number of dibao recipients nationally increased greatly, from 879, 000 in 1997 to 11.7 million in 2001, in the wake of the nationwide unemployment crisis of the early 2000s. Since 2002, the number has remained around 22 million. However, between 2002 and 2005, the number of urban laid-off workers (the sum of the unemployed (shiye) and off-duty workers (xiagang) in the statistical data) decreased by 8.6% from 9.13 million to 8.41 million. In contrast, the number of individuals characterized by the "three no's" (san wu) receiving dibao - people who have no family, who do not belong to a work unit and have absolutely no means of livelihood, who had been the only target for social relief in the Mao era - increased 4.2% from 920, 000 to 958, 000 during the same period. See data from the National Bureau of Statistics of China (1998-2006), http://www.stats.gov. cn. In this article, however, I do not use local data from Hadong to infer patterns at the national level. The focus of the article is to explore the relationship between the state and urban laid-off workers through the actual workings of poverty management at the local level.
5. Respecting advice from my informants, I will avoid referring to the products of this factory.
6. Other factors, not confined to the locale of Hadong, might account for the exclusion of many dibao recipients. Some government officials whom I met allude to difficult budget constraints. In Harbin, the municipal and district governments are responsible for 60% and 40% of the dibao expenditure, respectively. This means that the financial health of the local government district affects the selection of dibao recipients. Still, this speculation does not explain why relatively young, laid-off workers have become the first to be expelled from the dibao plan.
7. To cite just a few examples, Antoine Kernen and Jean-Louis Rocca, "Social responses to unemployment and the 'new urban poor": case study in Shenyang city and Liaoning province, " China Perspectives, Vol. 27 (2000), pp. 35-51;
8. Jun. Tang, Sha Lin and Zhenxing Ren, Zhongguo chengshi pinkun yu fan-pinkun baogao (Report on Poverty and Anti-Poverty in Urban China) (Beijing: Huaxia chubanshe, 2003);
9. Dayong Hong, Zhuanxing shiqi zhongguo shehui jiuzhu (Social Relief in China s Transition) (Shenyang: Liaoning jiaoyu chubanshe, 2004);
10. Dorothy J. Solinger, "The dibao recipients: mollified anti-emblem of urban modernization, " China Perspectives, No. 4 (2008), pp. 36-46;
11. Dorothy J. Solinger, "A question of confidence: state legitimacy and the new urban poor, " in Peter H. Gries and Stanley Rosen (eds.), State and Society in 21st Century China (New York: Routledge, 2009);
12. Dorothy J. Solinger, "The phase-out of the unfit: keeping the unworthy out of work, " in Lisa A. Keister (ed.), Work and Occupations in China: Research in the Sociology of Work (forthcoming).
13. I employ the practice of reasoning in terms of Paul Rabinow's understanding of reason, i.e., "a historically locatable social relation, an action in the world - a set of practices." Paul Rabinow, "Beyond ethnography: anthropology as nominalism, " Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 3, No. 4 (1988), p. 360.
14. Michel Foucault, "Governmentality, " in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (eds.), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 87-104. The concept of "governmentality" has opened a path for interrogating a wide range of technologies of governing. Governmental policies and programmes can be explored not merely as instrumental tools that regulate a target population from the top down but as particular apparatuses that shape the ways in which people conduct themselves. For examples of applying this concept to the study of policy-making in China, see Matthew Kohrman, Bodies of Difference: Experience of Disability and Institutional Advocacy in the Making of Modern China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005) and Susan Greenhalgh, Just One Child: Science and Policy in Deng's China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).
15. To cite just a few examples: Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (New York: Vintage Books, 1978);
16. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990);
17. for an example of scholarship specific to Chinese history, Li Zhang and Aihwa Ong (eds). Privatizing China: Socialism from Afar (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008).
18. James Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine: "Development, " Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), p. 13.
19. Data from the National Bureau of Statistics of China, http://www.stats.gov. cn.
20. Martin King Whyte and William L. Parish, Urban Life in Contemporary China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984);
21. Andrew G. Walder, Communist Neo-Traditionalism: Work and Authority in Chinese Industry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986);
22. Xiaobo Lü and Elizabeth J. Perry (eds.), Danwei: The Changing Chinese Workplace in Historical and Comparative Perspective (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1997).
23. Linda J. Wong, Marginalization and Social Welfare in China (New York: Routledge, 1998), p. 113.
24. The above English translation of the Bulletin can be found in Jun. Tang et al, Zhongguo chengshi pinkun yu fanpinkun baogao in Chinese Sociology and Anthropology, Vol. 36, Nos. 2-3 (2003-04), pp. 115-16.
25. Elizabeth J. Perry and Mark Selden (eds.), Chinese Society: Change, Conflict and Resistance (Routledge: New York, 2nd ed. 2003).
26. As of January 2009, 100 yuan amounts to about $14.60.
27. Zhongguo minzheng tongji nianjian (Civil Affairs Statistical Yearbook) (Beijing: Zhongguo tongji, 2007).
28. Interview, 19 February 2008.
29. Ching Kwan Lee, "The 'revenge of history': collective memories and labor protests in northeastern China, " Ethnography Vol. 1, No. 2 (2000), pp. 217-37;
30. William Hurst, "Understanding contentious collective action by Chinese laid-off workers: the importance of regional political economy, " Studies in Comparative International Development, Vol. 39, No. 2 (2004), pp. 94-120;
31. Ching Kwan Lee, Against the Law: Labor Protests in China's Rustbelt and Sunbelt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007);
32. William Hurst, The Chinese Worker after Socialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
33. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège De France 1977-1978 (New York: Palgrave, 2007), p. 1.
34. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, p. 139.
35. Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 24.
36. From "The summary table of dibao recipients in Hadong" (internal material of the Street Office). Apart from income, other items in the table do not represent national formulas but are based on modifications made in Harbin by local officials.
37. "Methods regarding the minimum-living-standard scheme for urban residents, " document of Harbin Government, No. 161 (11 July 2007).
38. Solinger, "The dibao recipients, " p. 44.
39. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, pp. 140-45.
40. For details in case of Harbin, wee http://www.hrbmzj.gov. cn (Harbin Bureau of Civil Affairs).
41. Jun. Tang, Sha Lin and Zhenxing Ren, Zhongguo chengshipinkun yu fanpinkun baogao, p. 55.
42. Xinping Guan, Zhongguo chengshi pinkun wenti yanjiu (Research on China's Urban Poverty) (Changsha: Hunan renmin chubanshe, 1999);
43. Shi Li, "Urban poverty research in China: poverty lines and methodology, " World Economy&China, Vol. 4 (2000), pp. 50-58;
44. Aiguo Lu and Manuel F. Montes, Poverty, Income Distribution and Well-being in Asia during the Transition (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002);
45. Jun. Tang, Sha Lin and Zhenxing Ren, Zhongguo chengshi pinkun yu fanpinkun baogao.
46. Interview, 18 July 2007.
47. The presumed income refers to an income standard that is computed assuming that anyone who is within working age has a full-time paying job. The use of presumed income in calculating dibao eligibility has persisted in many local governments though it has been criticized by scholars as being one of several common local polices that run contrary to the request of the central government to calculate actual income. Dayong Hong, Social Relief in China's Transition, p. 123. As of July 2007, the presumed income in Harbin was calculated as 439 yuan.
48. I borrow the term "machine" from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. What they call "machines, " unmoored from mechanistic connotations, refers to a series of devices for social subjection or enslavement. The users of the calculus machine, i.e. dibao recipients, experience subjection in the sense that they are required to follow its directions even though they have no means to access the enigmatic power of the machine. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
49. The Community and its predecessor, the Residents' Committee, is referred to by the government as a self-governing entity at the grassroots level. In this article, however, I include Community cadres in the category of state agents in that the Community has served as the de facto lowest level of the state apparatus. Implementing state policies remains one of the Community's primary duties despite growing attentions to community self-governance among both government officials and scholars.
50. Beginning in the early 2000s, this policy was introduced as one means of re-employing laid-off workers in their 40s and 50s. The government suggested that laid-off workers "equipped with some professional qualities" should be recruited as Community cadres after their technical training. Weimin Shi, "The normative policy documents on community building, " in Gang Bai (ed.), Chengshi jiceng quanli chongzu (Studies on Community Building in Urban China) (Beijing: China Social Sciences Press, 2006), p. 109.
51. "The income standard for individually-owned business or flexible work, " document of the Harbin Bureau of Civil Affairs, No. 29 (15 March 2004).
52. I thank a reviewer of this article for foregrounding this point.
53. This conversation reveals tension between an official in the Street Office who emphasizes strict law enforcement and a Community cadre who is sympathetic with her "neighbour." Nevertheless, by citing this example I do not mean to project any general pattern of state officials at different levels because their acts are relational - different according to whom they talk to. Rather, I introduce this conversation to show how local state officials are often caught at the edge between "the people" and "the population" in managing the poverty of their residents.
54. Stanley Rosen, Red Guard Factionalism and the Cultural Revolution in Guangzhou (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1982);
55. Jonathan Unger, Education under Mao: Class and Competition in Canton Schools, 1960-1980 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).
56. Elizabeth J. Perry and Xun Li, Proletarian Power: Shanghai in the Cultural Revolution (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), p. 64.
57. Ching Kwan Lee, "The 'revenge of history', " p. 228.
58. John E. Dixon, The Chinese Welfare System, 1949-1979 (New York: Praeger, 1981), p. 12.
59. Mao Tse-tung, "Telegram to the headquarters of the Loyang Front after the recapture of the city, " Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, Vol. IV (8 April 1948), http://www.marxists.org.
60. In a similar context, Solinger indicates how individuals of working age are often treated as if they were in fact holding jobs. Solinger, "A question of confidence."
61. Dayong Hong, Social Relief in China's Transition, pp. 64-78.