On the Edge between “the People” and “the Population

Ethnographic Research on the Minimum Livelihood Guarantee

Bibliographic Data

ID7100558
AuthorsMun Young Cho (corresponding author)
Year2010
Volume201
Pages20-37
Publication date2010-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe China Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0009-4439 • E-ISSN: 1468-2648
PublisherCambridge University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1017/s0305741009991056
OpenAlexW2029443188
LanguageEN
Citations received8
References cited28

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

Development economics · Economic growth · Economics · Ethnography · Geography · Government (linguistics · Livelihood · Local government · Norm (philosophy · Political economy · Political science · Poor people · Population · Poverty · Rationality · Resistance (ecology · Sociology · State (computer science · Urban poverty · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Law · Politics and Society in Latin America · Public Administration · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies

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