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On the Edge between “the People” and “the Population”: Ethnographic Research on the Minimum Livelihood Guarantee*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 March 2010

Mun Young Cho
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Abstract

This article examines how local resistance against government attempts to reduce poverty to a technical problem ironically reinforces the precarious state of the poor. It looks at the workings of the minimum livelihood guarantee (dibao) through mundane interactions between street-level officials and poor residents in a workers' village on the periphery of Harbin. As the party-state's primary policy for urban poverty, dibao has introduced a new rationality that poverty is calculable and flexible. Urban laid-off workers have resisted this by invoking the socialist claim that they are “the people.” I examine how this resistance has led street-level officials to be preoccupied with the old socialist norm of “an ability to work” rather than with “income” as dibao's official criterion. The new local criterion has produced the ironic effect that urban laid-off workers, who were understood to be dibao's main target, have been mostly excluded from the scheme.

Type
Research Article
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 201 , March 2010 , pp. 20 - 37
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 2010

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Footnotes

*

My thanks go to local government officials and residents in Hadong for the hospitality they have always shown me. I am indebted to James Ferguson, Li Zhang, Matthew Kohrman, Sylvia Yanagisako, Haijie Yin, Kevin O'Neill, Tania Ahmad and Ju Hyung Shim for their perceptive guidance. This article draws from my dissertation fieldwork (2006–08) in Harbin, supported by the National Science Foundation and the Wenner-Gren Foundation, as well as the Department of Anthropology, the Center for East Asian Studies, the Humanities Center, and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies all of Stanford University. An earlier draft was presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, November 2008.

References

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, Kernen, Antoine and Rocca, Jean-Louis, “Social responses to unemployment and the ‘new urban poor’”: case study in Shenyang city and Liaoning province,” China Perspectives, Vol. 27 (2000), pp. 35–51Google Scholar; Tang, Jun, Lin, Sha and Ren, Zhenxing, Zhongguo chengshi pinkun yu fanpinkun baogao (Report on Poverty and Anti-Poverty in Urban China) (Beijing: Huaxia chubanshe, 2003)Google Scholar; Hong, Dayong, Zhuanxing shiqi zhongguo shehui jiuzhu (Social Relief in China's Transition) (Shenyang: Liaoning jiaoyu chubanshe, 2004)Google Scholar; Solinger, Dorothy J., “The dibao recipients: mollified anti-emblem of urban modernization,” China Perspectives, No. 4 (2008), pp. 36–46Google Scholar; Solinger, Dorothy J., “A question of confidence: state legitimacy and the new urban poor,” in Gries, Peter H. and Rosen, Stanley (eds.), State and Society in 21st Century China (New York: Routledge, 2009)Google Scholar; 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).

8 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.” Rabinow, Paul, “Beyond ethnography: anthropology as nominalism,” Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 3, No. 4 (1988), p. 360CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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11 Ferguson, James, The Anti-Politics Machine: “Development,” Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), p. 13Google Scholar.

12 Data from the National Bureau of Statistics of China, http://www.stats.gov.cn.

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14 Wong, Linda J., Marginalization and Social Welfare in China (New York: Routledge, 1998), p. 113Google Scholar.

15 The above English translation of the Bulletin can be found in Tang, Jun et al., Zhongguo chengshi pinkun yu fanpinkun baogao in Chinese Sociology and Anthropology, Vol. 36, Nos. 2–3 (2003–04), pp. 115–16Google Scholar.

16 Perry, Elizabeth J. and Selden, Mark (eds.), Chinese Society: Change, Conflict and Resistance (Routledge: New York, 2nd ed. 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 As of January 2009, 100 yuan amounts to about $14.60.

18 Zhongguo minzheng tongji nianjian (Civil Affairs Statistical Yearbook) (Beijing: Zhongguo tongji, 2007).

19 Interview, 19 February 2008.

20 Lee, Ching Kwan, “The ‘revenge of history’: collective memories and labor protests in northeastern China,” Ethnography Vol. 1, No. 2 (2000), pp. 217–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hurst, William, “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. 94–120CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lee, Ching Kwan, Against the Law: Labor Protests in China's Rustbelt and Sunbelt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Hurst, William, The Chinese Worker after Socialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Foucault, Michel, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège De France 1977–1978 (New York: Palgrave, 2007), p. 1Google Scholar.

22 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, p. 139.

23 Escobar, Arturo, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 24Google Scholar.

24 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.

25 “Methods regarding the minimum-living-standard scheme for urban residents,” document of Harbin Government, No. 161 (11 July 2007).

26 Solinger, “The dibao recipients,” p. 44.

27 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, pp. 140–45.

28 For details in case of Harbin, wee http://www.hrbmzj.gov.cn (Harbin Bureau of Civil Affairs).

29 Jun Tang, Sha Lin and Zhenxing Ren, Zhongguo chengshi pinkun yu fanpinkun baogao, p. 55.

30 Guan, Xinping, Zhongguo chengshi pinkun wenti yanjiu (Research on China's Urban Poverty) (Changsha: Hunan renmin chubanshe, 1999)Google Scholar; Li, Shi, “Urban poverty research in China: poverty lines and methodology,” World Economy & China, Vol. 4 (2000), pp. 50–58Google Scholar; Lu, Aiguo and Montes, Manuel F., Poverty, Income Distribution and Well-being in Asia during the Transition (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jun Tang, Sha Lin and Zhenxing Ren, Zhongguo chengshi pinkun yu fanpinkun baogao.

31 Interview, 18 July 2007.

32 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.

33 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. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987)Google Scholar.

34 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.

35 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. Shi, Weimin, “The normative policy documents on community building,” in Bai, Gang (ed.), Chengshi jiceng quanli chongzu (Studies on Community Building in Urban China) (Beijing: China Social Sciences Press, 2006), p. 109Google Scholar.

36 “The income standard for individually-owned business or flexible work,” document of the Harbin Bureau of Civil Affairs, No. 29 (15 March 2004).

37 I thank a reviewer of this article for foregrounding this point.

38 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.

39 Rosen, Stanley, Red Guard Factionalism and the Cultural Revolution in Guangzhou (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1982)Google Scholar; Unger, Jonathan, Education under Mao: Class and Competition in Canton Schools, 1960–1980 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982Google Scholar).

40 Perry, Elizabeth J. and Li, Xun, Proletarian Power: Shanghai in the Cultural Revolution (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), p. 64Google Scholar.

41 Ching Kwan Lee, “The ‘revenge of history’,” p. 228.

42 Dixon, John E., The Chinese Welfare System, 1949–1979 (New York: Praeger, 1981), p. 12Google Scholar.

43 Tse-tung, Mao, “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)Google Scholar, http://www.marxists.org.

44 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.”

45 Dayong Hong, Social Relief in China's Transition, pp. 64–78.