[J-CHINA FORUM 국제학술회의] 시진핑의 중국 어디로 가나?
제2세션 18차 당대회 이후 중국의 사회·문화 발제문
A Question of Confidence: State Legitimacy and the New Urban Poor
Dorothy J. Solinger, University of California, Irvine
Is the Chinese state benevolent toward its poorest urban residents? And do those who depend upon it believe that it is? Do they expect that the state can be counted upon for what for them are future extensions of its current offerings? In order to address this question. I target the Minimum Livelihood Guarantee program (the zuidi shenghuo baozhang) and its subjects (the dibao duixiang, or dibao objects; dibaohu, or dibao households), set up nationally in September 1999. I claim that a major issue is the extent to which a bond of trust entwines beneficiary and benefactor in their interchange in this welfare sector, the degree to which, that is, the one has faith in the other.
I will argue that, paradoxically, the recipients of this hand-out place far more confidence in the powers-that-be than the leaders are willing to lend to them. Thus, in querying the existence a sense of legitimacy in the realm of the impoverished, it would seem that it is the state that raises questions of its partner, rather than the other way around. I first give a brief account of the context in which new poverty arose in Chinese cities in and after the mid-1990s and then of this social welfare program that was meant to address that penury. I move on to substantiate my claim that the state is much more suspicious of the indigent than the latter is of the state. The upshot is that while the destitute treat their governors as legitimate, that honor is not returned.
Following the massive dismissals of tens of millions of workers after 1995 in the leadership’s drive to upgrade the nation’s industry and make it more globally competitive, the poverty-stricken emerged as one subset of those who had been discharged from their firms. These were the people most disadvantaged--by age, poor health or disability, or by their total lack of any skills or credentials?those most unable to find a way to sustain their existence on their own. Today there are probably something like 30-40 million people who fall into this category.
The announced charge of the dibao program was to provide for urban residents whose household income failed to reach a municipality-determined minimal threshold; it was to supplement that income to the extent necessary to bring the family’s monthly wherewithal up to the level deemed requisite for basic survival in that city. Much like “reformed” Western welfare programs, it reeks of distrust of its objects. Unlike similar schemes in democracies, however, its administrators’ qualms are to be quieted by the watchful attention of the recipients’ co-residents in their community [shequ] courtyards.
A central justification for the scheme was to ensure control over and, ideally, the quietude of, the poverty-stricken. One writer went so far as to refer to the dibao as a “tranquilizer,” a kind of pill that would permit the state enterprises in Shenyang’s Tiexi district (a site of massive layoffs) to proceed without obstruction. In essence, the policy amounted to supplying indigent individuals with funds that were “just enough to keep body and soul together,” in the words of its leading scholar within China, Tang Jun.
In part, this doubtfulness is displayed in official prohibitions that dictate the type of people eligible for the funds and the activities of indigent people that should bar them from getting any allocation; in part it crops up in the course of determining whether or not specific households are entitled to receive the money. The extreme hesitancy with which applicants are vetted bespeaks less of stinginess (since the necessary cash is not really so scarce), than of a wariness in the face of what many donors judge very likely to be immorality and laziness on the part of the impoverished, or at least on the part of people whom administrators assume to be fraudulently pretending to be poor enough to qualify.
And not only do community program workers probe into supplicants’ style of life, occupation and assets, but their neighbors are invited to join in the assessment. It is only after successfully satisfying reiterations of surveys and surveillance that an applicant can obtain a bank book enabling the household head to draw a measly sum of money every month. Besides, the program personnel continue to inspect households at regular intervals to ensure that their style of life remains one of destitution if they are to continue on the rolls. And so it is only after invasive, extensive, and repetitive inquiries that a household can attain the lowly, and forever suspect, status of dibaohu.
On the part of the recipients, it would seem that frequently they sit weakly at home, waiting, wishing, and hoping for greater beneficence from their official provider sometime later, in the future. Their passivity could in part be related to the fact that some 60 percent of dibao recipients nationwide include one or more people with a chronic or hereditary disease. Despite their patience, however, they do have grievances.
But whether their concerns are for more money for their own or their relations’ health care, for financial help with their children’s education, for more commodious dwellings, for vocational training or a place of employment--or whether they simply want more generous hand-outs, in interviews they almost to a person couch their yearnings in dreams of the present regime’s turning more bounteous and charitable, instead of disparaging the churlish and grudging dispensations of the state they know. I would argue that this perspective comes from their training over decades of state socialism to expect provisioning from their government. Perhaps the poorest among them, still subsisting in a state of denial, have not yet fully perceived the stiff limits to the now-neoliberal state’s largesse. Or perhaps, from a different perspective, their situations have been so undermined by the collapse of the scaffolding that once buttressed their existence that ? no matter what they might believe ? they have no capacity left to fend for themselves.
Their dependency, vulnerability and incompetence incline these subjects ? at a loss as to where else to look ? toward the state as, they trust, the ultimate provider. Certainly the most disgruntled among them may rail bitterly against unfairness but do not seem enraged, just sorrowful about the scarcity and uncertainty that are their portion. But it is still under an understanding that the state stands for a certain decency to which they can appeal.
Is the regime legitimate in the eyes of its most needy urban citizens? Do these people ? many of whom once securely staffed the factories of a socialist society ? continue to place their trust in the leaders who led them to their present impotent and impoverished position? My data?which, granted, comes from a set of especially downtrodden subjects--suggest that, despite their rulers’ niggardly payouts ? a stinginess born of suspicion that cheats are legion, that tricksters lurk everywhere in the threadbare and barren homes of the wretched ? despite that state parsimony, still, these nearly abandoned wards continue to cling to what seems to an outsider to be best cast as an illusion: that they may yet find their relief in the beneficence of that state. For these beneficiaries, the state is legitimate; it is only themselves ? in the eyes of their state ? who are not.