Based on more than two decades of research in nine Chinese cities, political scientist Dorothy J. Solinger draws on over 100 in-depth field interviews to address a puzzle: “why and through what historical events and processes was the once-proud proletariat so suddenly appraised as passé, and why, when they were made into paupers, were they managed by the very minimal dibao so meagrely and in some ways increasingly so with time?” (p. 6).
The book is divided into four sections. The first introduces economic, political and social transformations in China since 1978, examining how these three critical shifts in the state's mission significantly impacted the life and work of the urban working class and eventually produced large numbers of urban poor. The second section includes the voices of laid-off workers, who were once “masters of the factory” but have since been turned into a marginal and underprivileged social group riddled with despair and isolation. This section also discusses the history and management of the dibao (minimum livelihood guarantee) policy, and how in practice it failed to include many eligible individuals and households. The third section compares three types of social assistance in China's dibao platform and considers how dibao recipients receive variable welfare disbursement allocations across municipalities. The fourth section examines recent trends in the dibao programme under Xi's leadership. While the party-state has reshaped its policy focus on eliminating rural poverty in recent years, there is a tendency to neglect those who have experienced drastic downward mobility in urban areas.
Poverty and Pacification's first major contribution is Solinger's convincing argument that the new urban poverty stratum in China is directly caused by the party-state's obsession with forging a modern workforce through industrial restructuring to achieve national rejuvenation. As a direct result, many urban workers who had once been promised lifetime employment “were purposively discarded and placed in the shadows; they have become invisible” (p. 4). In the past, the Chinese state adopted a cradle-to-grave welfare system in which welfare was delivered by work units and consisted of a non-contributory, state-employer design. With accelerated market reforms beginning in the mid-1980s, the state enterprise system was restructured and the guarantee of lifetime employment removed. Consequently, tens of millions of urban workers were laid off and forced into precarity. In the 1990s, the dibao policy emerged in response to high unemployment and urban poverty. This programme provided a basic livelihood guarantee as a social safety net for urban laid-off workers, and more importantly, to placate “troublesome” ex-workers and maintain social stability.
However, since 2009, there has been a dramatic drop in the number of urban dibao recipients. Major factors resulting in this narrowed scope for the target population include stricter eligibility criteria for living in absolute poverty, the decline in protests by urban laid-off workers due to the failure of previous efforts, the anti-corruption campaign to correct funding misuse, and the shifting political agenda to focus on rural poverty. However, as Solinger shows, the urban poor still remain impoverished and their children cannot receive proper schooling because of the plight of the family. “It is a kind of vicious circle,” she writes (p. 258). That is, with China's ambitious quest for modernity, the once-proud proletariat urban working class has been persistently abandoned by the state.
The book's second main contribution is its presentation of regional differences in the implementation of the dibao scheme across various kinds of cities across China. In my previous review of the author's 2019 edited volume Polarized Cities: Portraits of Rich and Poor in Urban China, I pointed out that while there is a considerable spatial imbalance in China, this edited volume only referred to megacities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen as constituting “urban China” (see American Journal of Sociology, vol. 126, no. 3). The current book has addressed this shortfall and evidently shows the different treatment that recipients of dibao have experienced in wealthier and poorer cities. Since there is no national poverty line for urban poverty (the national poverty line is only applicable in rural areas), cities usually apply their own dibao standards as official urban poverty lines. Normally, local authorities set a ceiling on the number of welfare beneficiaries according to the locality's budget and preference, and less developed cities usually keep their jurisdictional quotas at very limited levels, given their weak financial capacities.
For example, in Lanzhou, the capital city of Gansu Province (one of China's most poverty-stricken provinces), disadvantaged people and unemployed workers were allowed to earn money through flexible sidewalk businesses such as “stalls for fixing footwear and small bunches of young men hawking political-picture posters” (p. 180). By contrast, Wuhan, the capital city of Hubei Province, which aims for cosmopolitanism, has declared informal street businesses to be illegal and strictly forbidden. Moreover, while Lanzhou's local policy only barred three social categories of people from receiving dibao funds, 18 are disqualified in Wuhan.
However, the book's analysis would greatly benefit from the author employing a gender perspective when presenting the urban poor's experiences. Essentially, the plentiful empirical interview data that the author collected in her field work is a true gift, as it gives voice to the difficult and isolated lives of these urban workers. However, the situation of laid-off female workers is often even more grim. They are almost always first to be sacked and often face extra hardships on their marital relations and family lives as a result. Some even suffer domestic violence. Although the author gives several female interviewees’ brief stories (for example, a 37-year-old woman who was caring for four people after being laid off, see p. 117), critical analysis on gender issues would have offered additional perspective.
Overall, this excellent book is necessary reading for scholars of urban inequality, social mobility and stratification, and public policy – not only those working on China but anyone concerned with rising urban inequality across transitional contexts.
