Decentralization as a mode of governing the urban in China: Reforms in welfare provisioning and the rise of volunteerism

Pacific Affairs

Volumn 86, Issue 4, 2013, Pages 835-855

  Hoffman, Lisa ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON   (United States)

Author keywords

Decentralization; Foucault; Social organization; Subject formation; Urban china; Volunteerism

Indexed keywords

AUTONOMY; DECENTRALIZATION; GOVERNANCE APPROACH; URBAN DEVELOPMENT; URBAN PLANNING; URBAN POLITICS; URBAN SOCIETY; URBANIZATION; WELFARE IMPACT;

CHINA;

EID: 84889072096     PISSN: 0030851X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5509/2013864835     Document Type: Article

References (114)

1. A preliminary study and collection of printed material was conducted in December 2009, and fieldwork was undertaken in May/June of 2010 and June/July 2012.
2. Wu Fulong, "The Global and Local Dimensions of Place-making: Remaking Shanghai as a World City," Urban Studies 37, no. 8 (2000): 1359-77
3. Xu Jiang and Anthony G.O. Yeh, "City Repositioning and Competitiveness Building in Regional Development: New Development Strategies in Guangzhou," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29, no. 2 (2005): 283-308.
4. Yueman Yeung and Xuwei Hu, eds., China's coastal cities: Catalysts for modernization (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1992).
5. Studies of national minority autonomous regions are a rich site for these debates. See, for instance, Yash Ghai and Sophia Woodman, "Unused powers: contestation over autonomy legislation in the PRC," Pacific Affairs 82, no.1 (Spring 2009): 29-46.
6. Lisa Hoffman, Patriotic Professionalism in Urban China: Fostering Talent (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010).
7. I have used this analytical stance to elaborate, for instance, how neoliberal techniques of governing, and socialist politics and norms of behaviour are combined in "patriotic professionalism" in contemporary urban China (see Hoffman, Patriotic Professionalism).
8. Stephen Collier's discussion of Michel Foucault's later work in "Topologies of power: Foucault's analysis of political government beyond governmentality," Theory, Culture, and Society 26, no. 6 (2009): 78-108
9. Tania Murray Li's discussion of the practices of assemblages in "Practices of assemblage and community forest management," Economy and Society 36, no. 2 (May 2007): 263-293.
10. Colin McFarlane, "Translocal Assemblages: Space, Power and Social Movements," Geoforum 40, no. 4 (2009): 561-7
11. George E. Marcus and Erkan Saka, "Assemblage," Theory, Culture & Society 23, no. 2-3 (2006): 101-6+102
12. Tania Murray Li, "Governmentality," Anthropologica no. 49 (2007): 275-294.
13. Geographers, as well as anthropologists, have recently interrogated the usefulness of the term, assemblage, especially in light of what are termed the more "resultant formations" depicted by Foucauldian terms such as regime or apparatus, creating a kind of "balancing act" between structure and instability/heterogeneity
14. Marcus Saka, "Assemblage,"
15. McFarlane, "Translocal Assemblages,"
16. Paul Rabinow, Anthropos Today: Reflections on Modern Equipment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).
17. Aihwa Ong and Stephen J. Collier, eds., Global Assemblages: Technologies, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems (Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 2005)
18. Eugene McCann and Kevin Ward, "Urban Assemblages: Territories, Relations, Practices, and Power," in Mobile Urbanism: Cities and Policymaking in the Global Age, eds. E. McCann and K. Ward (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, xiii-xxxv).
19. Marcus and Saka, "Assemblage."
20. There are many types of volunteering in contemporary China. Some are organized through major events such as the Olympic Games, some are organized through the municipal Charity Federations, some through universities and their youth organizations, especially the Party apparatus, and some through local communities (shequ). Thus, not all volunteering is related to social issues, although that is the focus of my research and this discussion.
21. Jonathan Schwartz, "Environmental NGOs in China: Roles and Limits," Pacific Affairs 77 no. 1 (Spring 2004): 28-48
22. Daniel Robert Hammond, "Explaining Policy Making in the People's Republic of China: The Case of the Urban Resident Minimum Livelihood Guarantee System, 1992-2003" (Ph.D. thesis, University of Glasgow, 2009).
23. Ma Qiusha, Non-governmental Organizations in Contemporary China: Paving the Way to Civil Society? (New York: Routledge, 2006).
24. Tony Saich, "The Changing Role of Urban Government," in China Urbanizes: Consequences, Strategies, and Policies, eds. Shahid Yusuf and Tony Saich (Washington, DC: The World Bank, 2008),
25. David Bray, "Building Community: New Strategies of Governance in Urban China," Economy and Society 35, no. 4 (2006): 530-49
26. Ma, Non-governmental Organizations in Contemporary China, 58-61
27. Tony Saich, Enhancing Economic Security in Transition: Pluralism in Service Delivery (Geneva: International Labour Office, 2003)
28. Linda Wong and Jun Tang, "Dilemmas Confronting Social Entrepreneurs: Care Homes for Elderly People in Chinese Cities," Pacific Affairs 79, no. 4 (winter 2006/2007).
29. Linda Wong and Jun Tang, "Dilemmas Confronting Social Entrepreneurs: Care Homes for Elderly People in Chinese Cities," Pacific Affairs 79, no. 4 (winter 2006/2007): 623-640.
30. Xu Qingwen and John F. Jones, "Community Welfare Services in Urban China: A Public-Private Experiment," Journal of Chinese Political Science 9, no. 2 (2004): 47-62
31. Hammond, "Explaining Policy Making in the People's Republic of China"
32. Daniel R. Hammond, "Social Assistance in China, 1993-2002: Institutions, Feedback, and Policy Actors in the Chinese Policy Process," Asian Politics & Policy 3, no. 1 (2011): 69-93.
33. Hammond, "Social Assistance in China, 1993-2002," 72.
34. This last-resort safety net for urban residents is known as zuidi shenghuo baozhang, or more commonly, as dibao.
35. Dorothy J. Solinger, "The Dibao Recipients: Mollified Anti-Emblem of Urban Modernization," September 2008, http://www.socsci.uci.edu/~dorjsoli/china_perspectives_2008.pdf (accessed 18 August 2011), 3.
36. Solinger, "The Dibao Recipients," 4.
37. Hammond, "Explaining Policy Making in the People's Republic of China," 171-201
38. Xuand Jones, "Community Welfare Services in Urban China."
39. Hammond, "Explaining Policy Making in the People's Republic of China," 177, emphasis added. Hammond does note, however, that the Dalian model of NGO- and community-based aid management and provisioning did not become a national system. He argues one reason is because of the potential political sensitivity of "organising laid-off workers and the urban poor into NGOs, even if it was with state supervision attached" (197).
40. Dorothy J. Solinger, "Path Dependency Reexamined: Chinese Welfare Policy in the Transition to Unemployment," Comparative Politics 38, no. 1 (2005): 83-101+94.
41. On shequ (community) as a new urban institution, see David Bray, "Building 'community': New strategies of governance in urban China," 2006.
42. Rebecca Lee, "Modernizing Charity Law in China," Pacific Rim Law & Policy Journal 18, no. 2 (2009): 347-72
43. Qiusha Ma, "Defining Chinese Nongovernmental Organizations," Voluntas: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations 13, no. 2 (2002): 113-30
44. Marc A. Musick and John Wilson, Volunteers: A Social Profile (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 4.
45. Ding Yuanzhu, "Preface" and "China's Campus Volunteerism and Its Enabling Environment," 2005, http://www.worldvolunteerweb.org/fileadmin/docdb/pdf/2006/RCVW_English_Journal_1_pdf (accessed 18 February 2010), 1-2+4-15.
46. Qiusha Ma, Non-governmental Organizations in Contemporary China, 75.
47. Yang Tuan, "Can Volunteerism be Promoted through Government Administration?," 2005, http://www.worldvolunteerweb.org/fileadmin/docdb/pdf/2006/RC VW_English_Journal_1_.pdf (accessed 18 February 2010), 16-23, emphasis added. Students who volunteered during the Beijing Olympics were explicit about how their participation helped save the country money.
48. Chang Tianle, China Development Brief, "Government centre aims to converge 'parallel lines' of charity," http://www.chinadevelopmentbrief.com/node/1005, (accessed 29 August 2013). Recent estimates from the Ministry of Civil Affairs state that 700,000 groups had registered as "not-for-profit institutions to provide social services," in Saich, "The Changing Role of Urban Government," 198, and by 2003, there were 1268 registered foundations (jijinhui), the legal organization for private fundraising efforts, in Ma, Non-governmental Organizations in Contemporary China, 51. A United Nations study reports that there are "approximately 150,000 officially-registered social organizations," but that many groups are not registered or are registered as businesses; United Nations 2009, 58-9.
49. Lee notes that in a matter of 15 years of reforms, the funds for "social welfare programs dropped from thirty-one percent of national income to a mere thirteen percent" C. David Lee, "Legal Reform in China: A Role for Nongovernmental Organizations," The Yale Journal of International Law 25, no. 363 (2000): 262-434, 381.
50. The philanthropic field in China has been characterized as "monopolized by the government" through this organization and the Red Cross Society of China Caijing, "Quake Shakes 'Official' Charities in China," June 30, 2008, http://english.caijing.com.cn/2008-06-30/100072278.html (accessed 17 February, 2009).
51. Joanna F. Handlin Smith, "Social Hierarchy and Merchant Philanthropy as Perceived in Several late-Ming and Early-Qing Texts," Journal of Economic and Social History of the Orient 41, no. 3 (1998): 417-451
52. Joanna F. Handlin Smith, The Art of Doing Good: Charity in Late Ming China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).
53. It is also important to note that while the term, cishan, is translated into English as charity or philanthropy, these terms have two distinct meanings in the United States. Following Robert Gross, charity refers to the "impulse to personal service" that is rooted in "concrete, direct acts of compassion and connection to other people"
54. Robert A. Gross, "Giving in America: From Charity to Philanthropy," in Charity, Philanthropy, and Civility in American History, eds. Lawrence J. Friedman and Mark D. McGarvie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 31. Philanthropy, on the other hand, refers to a more "rationalized" process and organization that "sought to apply reason to the solution of social ills and needs [and] aspires not so much to aid individuals as to reform society"
55. Gross, "Giving in America," 31.
56. Gladys Pak Lei Chong, "Volunteers as the 'New' Model Citizens: Governing Citizens through Soft Power," China Information 25, no. 1 (2011): 33-59+33.
57. Unn Malfrid H. Rolandsen, "A Collective of Their Own: Young Volunteers at the Fringes of the Party Realm," in iChina: The Rise of the Individual in Modern Chinese Society, eds. Mette Halskov Hansen and Rune Svarverud (Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2010), 138-9.
58. The Dalian Charity Federation has published yearbooks with reports that outline their accomplishments, for instance on the number of charity volunteers (cishan yigong), and with articles about how to develop these activities in the city. Yu Xuexiang, "Reflections on several points about how to build and develop philanthropy in Dalian" [Dalian cishan shiye jianshe he fazhan de jidian sikao], in Dalian Charity Yearbook 2004-2008 (in Chinese) (Dalian: Dalian Charity Federation, 2009), 38-40
59. Li Hongqing, "Strengthen citizens' philanthropic consciousness, raise citizens' philanthropic participation" [Zengqiang gongmin cishan yishi; tigao gongmin cishan canyudu], in Dalian Charity Yearbook 2004-2008 (in Chinese) (Dalian: Dalian Charity Federation, 2009), 83-85.
60. Qiusha Ma, Non-governmental Organizations in Contemporary China: Paving the Way to Civil society? 2006: 9, emphasis added.
61. The efforts in 2008 have been called "the largest donation initiative and one-time philanthropic undertaking ever in Chinese history"
62. Zheng Yuanchang, "Wenchuan Earthquake Civic Donation and the Inspiration of Modern Philanthropy within China," The China Nonprofit Review 1, no. 2 (2009): 247-62.
63. Individuals, as well as corporations, responded, generating 3.5 times more donations in 2008 than in 2007. The China Economic Review reported that the Ministry of Civil Affairs had received USD 4.25 billion by 30 May, after the earthquake, in comparison to approximately USD 600 million for all of 2007; see China Economic Review, "A time for giving," 2008, www.chinaeconomicreview.com/cer/2008_07/A_time_for_giving.html (accessed 23 February 2010). In addition, claims were madethat "almost half of the listed firms on the Chinese stock market made relief efforts"
64. Zhang Ran, Zabihollah Rezaee and Jigao Zhu, "Corporate Philanthropic Disaster Response and Ownership Type: Evidence from Chinese Firms' Response to the Sichuan Earthquake," Journal of Business Ethics 91, no. 1 (2009): 51-63. In comparison, Rebecca Lee notes that a 2005 report stated that "ninety-nine percent of corporations did not engage in any form of charitable donations"
65. Lee, "Modernizing Charity Law in China," 368. There remain many questions about how many of the corporations actually fulfilled their 2008 earthquake relief pledges.
66. United Nations Volunteers, Laws and Policies Affecting Volunteerism, 26. The United Nations report on volunteering noted that volunteering regulations in China not only "channel and direct volunteerism toward government priorities," but also that "advocacy is excluded from the definition of permitted volunteer work"; see United Nations 2009, 26.
67. Xinhua News 2011 "Key Targets of China's 12th five-year Plan," http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/china/2011-03/05/c_13762230.htm (accessed 29 August 2013).
68. John Wilson, "Volunteering," Annual Review of Sociology 26 (2000): 215-240
69. Musick and Wilson, Volunteers: A Social Profile, 12.
70. Musick and Wilson, Volunteers: A Social Profile
71. Stebbins 2009
72. Leslie Rebecca Bloom and Deborah Kilgore, "The Volunteer Citizen after Welfare Reform in the United States: An Ethnographic Study of Volunteerism in Action," Voluntas: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations 14, no. 4 (2003): 431-54.
73. Musick and Wilson, Volunteers: A Social Profile, 14.
74. Musick and Wilson, Volunteers: A Social Profile, 16, 25.
75. Chong, "Volunteers as the 'New' Model Citizens," 34. This definition comes from the Manual for Beijing Olympic Volunteers, published in 2006 by the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games.
76. Friederike Fleischer, "Technology of Self, Technology of Power: Volunteering as Encounter in Guangzhou, China," Ethnos 76, no. 3 (2011): 300-25, 322.
77. Chong, "Volunteers as the 'New' Model Citizens," 39.
78. Rolandsen, "A Collective of Their Own," 141, emphasis added.
79. Robert Stebbins, "Would you volunteer?" in Society 46 (2009): 155-159, 155.
80. Yang Tuan, "Can Volunteerism be Promoted through Government Administration?"
81. Three focus group interviews were conducted in May and June 2010 with university students in Dalian who were active in volunteering. All interviews were taped and in the process of being transcribed when a research laptop was stolen. Thus, direct quotes are derived only from the first focus group interview as the other interviews had to be reconstructed from memory. Generalized trends have been found across the group interviews.
82. Zhang Yongling and Lin Jing, "Volunteerism in China (I): National Policies, Student Responses, and Two Case Studies of Self-organized Volunteer Programs: Guest Editors' Introduction to Part I," Chinese Education & Society 41, no. 3 (2008): 3-13+8.
83. Lee, "Legal Reform in China."
84. Andrew Kipnis, "Suzhi: A Keyword Approach," China Quarterly 186 (2006): 295-313
85. Andrew Kipnis, "Neoliberalism reified: Suzhi Discourse and Tropes of Neoliberalism in the People's Republic of China," Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13, no. 2 (2007): 383-400
86. Terry Woronov, "Transforming the Future: 'Quality' Children for the Chinese Nation" (Ph.D. thesis, University of Chicago, 2003)
87. Terry E. Woronov, "Raising Quality, Fostering 'Creativity': Ideologies and Practices of Education Reform in Beijing," Anthropology and Education Quarterly 39, no. 4 (2008): 401-22
88. Rachel Murphy, "Turning Peasants into Modern Chinese Citizens: 'Population Quality' Discourse, Demographic Transition and Primary Education," China Quarterly 177 (2004): 1-20
89. Ann Anagnost, "The Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi)," Public Culture 16, no. 2 (2004): 189-208
90. Susan Greenhalgh and Edwin Winckler, Governing China's Population: From Leninist to Neoliberal Biopolitics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005)
91. Yan Hairong, "Neoliberal Governmentality and Neohumanism: Organizing Suzhi/Value Flow through Labor Recruitment Networks," Cultural Anthropology 18, no. 4 (2003): 493-523
92. Yan, Hairong, "Spectralization of the Rural: Reinterpreting the Labor Mobility of Rural Young women in Post-Mao China," American Ethnologist 30, no. 4 (2003): 578-96.
93. Ann Anagnost, National Past-times: Narrative, Representation, and Power in Modern China (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1997)
94. Greenhalgh and Winckler, Governing China's Population.
95. Friederike Fleischer, "Technologies of Power and Self: Young Volunteers in Guangzhou," paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, New Orleans, Los Angeles, November 2010
96. Fleischer, "Technology of Self, Technology of Power"
97. Ling Minhua, "Help the Child, Discipline the Citizen: Encounters between Local NGOs and Migrant Workers' Children in Urban China," paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, New Orleans, Louisiana, November 2010
98. Zhang Xia, "One Life for Sale: Charitable Activities, Affect Labor and New Form of Work in China," paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, New Orleans, Louisiana, November 2010.
99. Lee, "Legal Reform in China," 399.
100. Elaine S.C. Liu, Michael J. Holosko and T. Wing Lo, eds., Youth Empowerment and Volunteerism: Principles, Policies and Practices (Hong Kong: City University of Hong Kong Press, 2009).
101. Mark Snyder and Allen M. Omoto, "Who gets involved and why? The psychology of volunteerism," in Youth Empowerment and Volunteerism: Principles, Policies and Practices, eds. Elaine S.C. Liu, Michael J. Holosko and T. Wing Lo (Hong Kong: City University of Hong Kong Press, 2009), 3-26+5 These opportunities are understood as opportunities for self-actualization and "personal development"
102. T. Wing Lo, Songxing Su, and Guoping Jiang, "Youth Empowerment and Self- Actualisatin: Experiences in Shanghai, China," in Youth Empowerment and Volunteerism: Principles, Policies and Practices, eds. Elaine S.C. Liu, Michael J. Holosko, and T. Wing Lo (Hong Kong: City University of Hong Kong Press, 2009), 251-273.
103. This is especially true for volunteer participation in organized events, such as the Olympics, in which there is extensive training; see Chong, "Volunteers as the 'New' Model Citizens."
104. Fleischer, "Technology of Self, Technology of Power," 314; Rolandsen, "A Collective of Their Own."
105. Handlin Smith, "Social Hierarchy and Merchant Philanthropy as Perceived in Several late-Ming and Early-Qing Texts," 1998 and The Art of Doing Good: Charity in Late Ming China, 2009.
106. Liu Zhongquan, "China's Cultural Tradition of Philanthropy and its Modern Transformation" [Zhongguo cishan wenhua chuantong yu xiandai xing zhua xing houji bofa] (Dalian: Dalian University of Technology, n.d., unpublished manuscript).
107. Other programs also offer incentives to participate, such as extra credit points on the graduate school entrance examination if one participates in the Go West project; see Zhang and Lin, "Volunteerism in China (I)," 7.
108. Anita Lacey and Suzan Ilcan, "Voluntary Labor, Responsible Citizenship, and International NGOs," International Journal of Comparative Sociology 47, no. 1 (2006): 34-53, 36, 37.
109. Loet al., 2009, 268.
110. Rolandsen, "A Collective of Their Own."
111. Hoffman, Patriotic Professionalism, 2010
112. Nikolas Rose, "Governing 'Advanced' Liberal Democracies," in Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-liberalism and Rationalities of Government, eds. Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996).
113. Unn Malfrid H. Rolandsen, in fact, argued that the volunteer group she studied was "a new form of collective which provides its participants with an opportunity to be members of a meaningful social group"
114. Rolandsen, "A Collective of Their Own," 151.