China's Minimum Living Security System (zuidi shenghuo baozhang zhidu 最低生活保障制度), also known as dibao 低保, is China's most important social assistance scheme.Footnote 1 Reflecting the urban–rural dualism in Chinese public policy based around its unique household registration system (hukou 户口), dibao has urban and rural components and was designed to complement the rural “five guarantees” (wubao 五保) scheme, a well-established but comparatively small-scale programme targeted exclusively at elders without family support.Footnote 2 Official statistics indicate that at the end of 2016, dibao was received by 45.9 million rural and 14.8 million urban citizens.Footnote 3
As the world's largest cash social assistance system, dibao has more in common in terms of legal form and scale with provisions in Europe than with most poverty alleviation programmes in developing countries.Footnote 4 However, some challenges of delivery, including mal-targeting, are certainly comparable with those of middle-income countries.Footnote 5 Dibao has received considerable attention from policymakers and researchers, much of it examining policy design, implementation, targeting and efficiency.Footnote 6 Most relevant to the present concern is the work of Miangan Li and Robert Walker conducted in a single village in south-west China.Footnote 7 They confirm the commonly reported finding that much dibao fails to reach those for whom it is intended but explain this in terms of “institutional alienation,” as the scheme is co-opted by local decision makers to foster social cohesion and prevent social unrest. They show that, consequently, the degree of stigma attaching to dibao is less than might have been anticipated for a scheme targeted on poverty. Instead, dibao confers status, first, because it is received by many people who have high social standing and high interpersonal connections (guanxi 关系) and therefore influence with village elites, and second, because dibao is seen as a social resource that may be received by anyone, not just by poor people. They also find that poverty itself is considered to be shameful by those experiencing poverty and others alike, that the shame has increased as poverty levels have fallen, and that those who receive dibao because of their poverty are doubly stigmatized, for being both poor and needing to rely on state assistance.Footnote 8
There is growing evidence of substantial geographic variation within China in the informal institutions that shape local attitudes and influence policy implementation.Footnote 9 Macro-influences such as clan structures, lineage and the role of religion as well as micro factors such as village hierarchies and variations in social cohesion and collective memory all have an impact. Whereas Li and Walker's research was based in one village in south-west China, the study reported here draws evidence from eight villages located in northern China.
For the most part, Li and Walker were working with concepts derived from Western research. In contrast, this article draws on two streams of indigenous Chinese scholarship. The reason for doing so is that the experience of shame is deeply embedded within social relationships and the relational structure in China is arguably unique. The first stream of scholarship concerns the notion of “face,” a close Chinese approximation to shame, which is illustrated in work by David Ho that depicts two variants of face: lian 脸 and mian 面.Footnote 10 The second literature is represented by Fei Xiaotong's efforts to characterize the everyday practice of social relationships (chaxu geju 差序格局, which can be translated as “differential mode of association”).Footnote 11
The aim of this article is therefore not to provide a policy analysis of dibao, or to evaluate policy efficiency or effectiveness; rather, by applying the lenses of lian, mian and chaxu geju, it seeks to enrich understanding of the expression of poverty-related shame in the context of dibao, China's largest social assistance system.
To preview the findings, most villagers, both recipients and non-recipients of dibao, attached shame and loss of face to poverty but not to receipt of dibao. Whereas a lack of money was considered to be deeply shameful, involving the loss of both mian and lian, receiving dibao was generally regarded as “glorious.” This is consistent with the observations reported by Li and Walker although, as is explained below, for somewhat different reasons. Moreover, at first sight, this finding is at odds with the consensus of experience in the West where social assistance receipt is heavily stigmatized. Again, the reality is more complicated: dibao, it turns out, is less a benefit targeted based on need and more a statement of a person's embeddedness in social relationships.
In the reminder of this article, the key concepts are first defined and the research methodology and policy context explained. There is then an examination of the intersection of shame and loss of face with poverty and receipt of dibao. The article closes with some tentative conclusions.
Poverty, Shame and Social Relations: Introducing Concepts
The Chinese government is committed to eradicating poverty by 2020 and has lifted 700 million people out of poverty since marketization.Footnote 12 Rural poverty fell from 96.2 per cent in 1980 to 5.7 per cent in 2015 and urban poverty has nominally been eliminated.Footnote 13 These are unprecedented achievements by any standards but reflect a limited conception of poverty.
Low income is an inadequate indication of poverty. To an extent this is recognized by the Chinese authorities who increasingly emphasize the importance of education, employment and good health. However, the policy focus remains on the immediate causes of low income rather than on its individual and structural ramifications. Hence, the debilitating consequences of the shame and stigma that so often accompany poverty have largely been ignored in China's policy discourse, although a number of academic studies have begun to document their importance.Footnote 14
Shame itself, however, is a prevalent and important notion in Chinese culture and receives much academic attention.Footnote 15 Recent anthropological and sociological research on shame has highlighted the importance of “face,” which brings together dignity, honour, authority, standards of behaviour, status and prestige. “Loss of face” is considered to be a cause as well as a manifestation of shame.Footnote 16 The concept of “face” can be further refined with respect to mian and lian. Mian generally refers to a reputation acquired through social success and adherence to a moral code, whereas lian reflects society's confidence in the individual and the integrity of their moral character, “the loss of which makes it impossible for them to function properly within the community.”Footnote 17 Lian represents respect conferred on people who have shown themselves to be “decent human beings” by fulfilling their moral obligations irrespective of circumstance; it is “both a social sanction for enforcing moral standards and an internalized sanction.”Footnote 18 While loss of lian and shame are intimately related through their association with morality, mian is not altogether devoid of amoral content. Furthermore, the meanings of lian and mian vary but cannot be completely differentiated from each other because the terms are interchangeable in some contexts.Footnote 19
While there is significant overlap between face and Western conceptions of internal and external shame and between the arenas in which lian and mian are exposed and the concepts of personal, social and institutional stigma, there is no one-to-one correspondence.Footnote 20 Face is a dynamic concept. Losing or gaining face is associated with criteria that change over time and which reflect the everyday practice of social relations. The criteria for judging face reflect the prevailing morality of the times and can be among the causes of social change as well as being manifestations of it. The Chinese saying, “the poor are laughed at, but not prostitutes” (xiaopin bu xiaochang 笑贫不笑娼), which refers to a morally decayed society, well illustrates the relationship between face, morality and culture.
In the 1930s, Fei Xiaotong characterized traditional Chinese social relations as comprising an egocentrically orientated social network with the dyadic relationships being differentially categorized according to proximity, mutual obligations, moral expectations and other content. In the terms that Fei used to describe this system, chaxu geju, cha 差 refers to social relations within the same social class, while xu 序 highlights hierarchical power relations between different social classes (geju 格局 simply means pattern of arrangement). Fei defines some further concepts necessary to comprehend the nature of the relationships described under chaxu geju, the most important of which is guanxi, which refers to the “dyadic relationship between individuals that is based implicitly (rather than explicitly) on mutual interest and benefits.”Footnote 21
China has of course changed fundamentally since Fei's specification of chaxu geju in the 1930s.Footnote 22 The ethical principles linked to kin and local geography that characterized chaxu geju were largely incompatible with Maoist systems of redistribution and at odds with subsequent market-orientated mechanisms.Footnote 23 Marketization, the decline of collectivization, the rise of living standards and the resultant consumerism may well have caused economic benefits to be prioritized over moral obligations and hierarchy in defining social relationships.Footnote 24 Within rural areas, the old “moral economy,” which was based on the priority of subsistence with the associated moral vision, sense of justice, obligations to charity and moral obligation,Footnote 25 is under threat as social relations in the form of guanxi are being increasingly deployed instrumentally to secure economic benefits as “instrumental-personal ties.”Footnote 26 A by-product of social change is that individuals are able to accumulate guanxi through action and class position, which often attracts the envy of others. Moreover, in the context of government and bureaucracy, guanxi is often an illegal backdoor connection to government officials and a source of corruption. And yet, chaxu geju is still recognizable in rural areas and has mutated rather than ceased to exist in urban ones. Guanxi retains positive connotations of closeness and there is a persistent belief, for example, that allowing decisions to be taken through open competition – rather than using well-established guanxi – is inefficient, ineffective and even disloyal.Footnote 27 But, while the structures and obligations of chaxu geju remain, the moral content has evolved with implications for face and for poverty-related shame.Footnote 28
With these developments in mind, dibao serves as an ideal setting in which to explore the modern expression of face and chaxu geju in rural China. Paraphrasing the legal “Notice of Establishment,” dibao, consolidated as a national scheme in 2007, is intended “to secure a sustainable solution to problems of insufficient food and inadequate clothing.”Footnote 29 This is to be achieved by providing unconditional cash transfers to people in households below an income threshold or a de facto poverty line. The scheme, therefore, has the trappings of a rights-based system of provision. However, this is undermined by budget constraints, which means that resource allocations in many parts of China are insufficient to meet the needs of those with incomes below the threshold. As a scheme of last resort with receipt ostensibly based on demonstrable need but where the outcome of an application is uncertain, international evidence would predict that dibao would be heavily stigmatized.Footnote 30 The fact that dibao is often seen as “glorious” rather than stigmatizing can best be understood with reference to the concepts of lian, mian and chaxu geju.
Research Methods and Local Policy Context
This research draws on qualitative fieldwork research in eight villages managed by two townships within a county administration in northern Shanxi. We call this county Sky County. Designated as a “state poverty county” under the 1986 “National-level poorest counties” scheme, Sky County has been prioritized for financial transfer payments, project funding and infrastructure construction. Ironically, achieving this poverty status is a source of pride for county governors and officials since the scheme is competitive. At the time of writing, the villages had populations ranging between about 400 and 2,750. All had significant minorities of younger residents who had migrated to urban areas and most of the remaining population in employment was engaged in agriculture or light industries.
Fieldwork was undertaken between 2015 and 2016 and comprised participant observation, interviews and eight focus group discussions. The participant observation entailed researchers observing interactions between villagers and village cadres, poor and non-poor villagers, dibao applicants and local officials. In-depth interviews were conducted with 86 dibao recipients and 24 village cadres, both groups being randomly selected from official lists, and with 27 other villagers not receiving dibao, who were purposively chosen after being snowballed from initial suggestions provided by village leaders. Some 31 of the villagers interviewed, 15 of whom received dibao, were considered by village leaders to be “exceptionally poor.” In addition, we interviewed six low- and medium-ranking township officials and three county-level officials. Finally, two sets of focus groups were conducted, one comprising meetings with three groups of villagers in two villages, the second involving discussions with a group of low- and middle-ranking officials working in each of the two townships.
Dibao was introduced to Sky County in 2007 at the time of the national consolidation and is jointly-funded through a central government grant and contributions from local governments which are based on their financial capacity.Footnote 31 Initially, payments were too low to justify the local terminology “eating on dibao” (chi dibao 吃低保), which implied an adequate subsistence income, but from 2011 onwards payments moved ahead of the national norm and became an increasingly important source of household income (Tables 1 and 2). By November 2016, dibao covered 23,200 individuals, 18.2 per cent of the rural population in Sky County, with monthly dibao payments averaging 232 yuan, which was much higher than the national average of 164 yuan.
Rural dibao in China, 2008–2017
Source:
Ministry of Civil Affairs and National Statistics Bureau of the PRC. Data taken from November of year shown.
Rural dibao in Sky County, 2008–2017
Source:
Ministry of Civil Affairs. Data taken from November of year shown.
Notes:
Benefits were reassessed in 2014 and many people only paid in 2015.
Sky County was not unusual in that the early implementation of dibao was characterized by rent-seeking and abuse such that, for the most part, it could only be obtained through established interpersonal relationships (guanxi) with county government officials.Footnote 32 What was unusual was that in 2012 this abuse was exposed in the national media. As a consequence, new applications for dibao in the county were suspended until the national programme was reformed in 2014.
Thereafter, to eliminate corruption at the township and county levels, dibao decision making and management were largely devolved to the village-level dibao management committees, which were now responsible for implementing dibao including the selection of dibao recipients. In fact, in seven of the eight villages, dibao implementation and decision making was largely controlled by the members of the village Party cell (cun dangzhibu 村党支部) and the village committee (cunweihui 村委会), with decisions either being taken by the Party secretary or by a slightly larger group of village cadres. Villagers were often not au fait with these decision-making structures and often village cadres, to avoid local conflicts, in fact claimed that dibao decisions were made by the township and county governments.
The 2014 reforms also included attempts to regulate eligibility criteria and to standardize working practices with computer-based assessments while at the same time retaining scope for local flexibility, which was a characteristic of the initial programme design. In practice, local flexibility meant that rather than eligibility for dibao being based on an individual's current need, villages chose to make awards for life and to keep the same number of awards each year; this meant that the number of new awards available annually was dependent on the deaths of incumbents. A second major deviation from the national scheme, the imposition of an age criteria, transformed dibao from a selective needs-based system into a universal old age and disability benefit. In most of the villages, people with long-standing illnesses became eligible for dibao from the age of 60, while other people would receive it at a later age, most commonly 80. Decisions on age thresholds and health conditions were generally fixed and based on the number of villagers perceived to be deserving of benefit rather than by independently determining eligibility criteria.
These additional criteria served largely to supplant the economic criteria included in the computer-based assessment, not least because income proved so difficult to establish, as neatly explained by a cadre in one village:
in a village, household income is often so diversified that it is hard to know how much a migrant worker can bring home. It is also hard to know how much they receive from their son or daughter.Footnote 33
However, the criteria did not entirely remove the role of guanxi. Indeed, anyone with well-established guanxi with cadres at county, township or village level was effectively guaranteed receipt of dibao, certainly if they fulfilled the nominal criteria and often when they did not. According to local village cadres, one mechanism by which this was achieved was through emergency payments where approval was at the discretion of the village head or committee.
Poverty, Loss of Face and Shame
In all eight villages, being poor was often thought to be associated with the break-up of social relations and was viewed as shameful both by villagers experiencing poverty and by others who were not.
Poverty, shame and personal responsibility
In the Maoist era, poverty was presented as a virtue, potentially attracting high lian: “the poorer you are, the more glorious you become.”Footnote 34 Today, non-poor villagers explained the causes of poverty as “being lazy,” “being less smart than the others,” “being sick,” having “extremely heavy family burdens” and occasionally as “being unlucky.” Once poverty is individualized in this way, communities’ attitude towards people in poverty turns to indifference, and poor people and their difficulties become largely invisible. As one village cadre explained:
In general [non-poor] villagers do not despise those poor. They just don't care about them [the poorest households in the community]. When villagers chat, they may gossip about them. But after all, it is all their fault – being lazy or just bad luck; they haven't grabbed the opportunity to make money. Other than gossip, no one can help nor really cares about them … People only care about themselves and the other members of their social network … Once you become poor, you drop from your existing network. No one remembers the pitiable ones and it is your destiny.Footnote 35
Respondents facing poverty generally described their loss of lian in terms of being looked down upon, excluded or marginalized. If non-poor villagers were casually dismissive of “the poor,” people in poverty were passionate about the negativity of poverty. They felt that they had no choice but to accept the values and attitudes of the society that in effect linked a person's integrity to their economic success or failure. Therefore, they hated being poor, not solely the financial hardship that they necessarily endured, but more particularly the loss of lian, which both reduced their agency and meant that their ability to function effectively in society was under constant challenge. Feeling marginalized and neglected, they frequently resented their treatment by the mainstream community. The views of Chen, a 46-year-old woman, were typical:
After spending the whole day in the village head's greenhouses picking tomatoes, I cannot walk properly because of ten hours of kneeling. My patched clothes are all dirty and even more shabby than before. I often slip along the village sideway back to home, like a mouse. I hate being seen like this by others. But then I ask myself: “Who cares? Who really cares about us poor?” People only greet me if they are in the mood; otherwise, I am neglected like a mouse. Nobody sees me as a human … I hate myself and I hate others … Maybe I hate the whole thing.Footnote 36
The loss of lian, expressed as self-hatred, corresponds closely with internalized shame and felt-stigma discussed in Western literature.Footnote 37 Apart from Chen, quite a few other respondents living in poverty described themselves as mice or rats (laoshu 老鼠). One elderly bachelor defined himself as a “useless food bucket.” Others were depressed and disgusted by their circumstances. A man with kidney disease was ashamed and resentful at being unable to pay for a urine bag. Another man, injured at work on a construction site a decade ago, felt that he was even stigmatized by his wife and family because he could not provide for the education costs of his children; he had no lian, his dignity denied:
I must be the most incapable man in the world. My wife says I am not a man. I don't want to learn what other people think about me. I don't dare to talk – before I start talking, other people would say, “What do you know – you know nothing!” … But I have to survive. People cannot hurt me anymore. A person like me has no lian to lose!Footnote 38
Lian was further eroded when people in poverty were denied social assistance. (Only 15 of the 31 persons identified as the poorest in the village received dibao.) This seemed to be because people felt that they had lost public recognition of their needs when they were refused, or were otherwise excluded from, dibao. They, in effect, became undeserving and the resultant shame was often accompanied by anger and feelings of desperation. Li, a woman in her late fifties, elaborated on this process:
I've had diabetes for 20 years. They said diabetes is not a major disease and therefore I cannot eat on dibao. I went to the village committee, the township government and the county civil affairs bureau. But the officials told me: “unless you are stuck in bed, eating and discharging in bed, your disease is not serious.” I have no guanxi with officials. I am incapable of eating on dibao. I feel people all look down on me. So, I avoid crowds and refuse to cry in front of the others … I feel I have no lian.Footnote 39
To summarize, loss of lian has traditionally been associated with immoral behaviour. However, marketization and the prioritization of economic success have led to the emergence of social hierarchies (xu) based on economic status. Prosperity confers high mian while poverty bestows low mian. With poverty now attributed to individuals’ deficiencies, behaviour and circumstances, poverty is also associated with loss of lian, which serves as a social punishment for economic failure and results in social exclusion and further disempowerment.
Poverty, shame and social relations
Returning to the concept of chaxu geju and how this is affected by poverty, most of the people in the deepest poverty (26 out of 31) reported that they were also socially isolated. In many cases, they were alienated from their close family and hence from the traditional concept of a family-oriented self.Footnote 40 The reason has to do with poverty-related shame, loss of lian and the process of allocating blame within the collective family-self. Parents blamed themselves for not being able to provide a better standard of living or education for their children, while sons felt ashamed that they were unable to fulfil their obligations as demanded by filial piety. Women censured their husbands because they were demonstrably poor breadwinners. Young people blamed parents for the bad financial start they had in life, while parents feared that they would be blamed in this way and that their offspring would punish them by not abiding by the expectations of filial piety. Thus, poverty causes the familial-self to become “schizophrenic” as family members share the loss of lian that poverty conveys but try to reapportion blame away from the individual self:
My son went outside [the village] for paid work when he was only 16, because I couldn't afford for him to go to a secondary training school after he graduated from high school … He rarely comes back and doesn't even phone home … I am wondering whether he blames me for that.Footnote 41
I have two brothers and four sisters, and I am definitely the poorest. I know I am the least filial son of my parents … My siblings don't come to my house at all and I know they are dissatisfied with me because I don't give as much as they do to our parents … I have been doing my best to give more personal care to my parents [than the other siblings] because I cannot give them much money. But I feel that my parents don't treat me with much respect, because I am poor.Footnote 42
Poverty has similar ramifications beyond the immediate family. For example, poverty frequently makes it impossible for people to engage in the implicit reciprocity that fuels chaxu geju. Almost all the respondents experiencing poverty reported either being neglected or excluded from wider networks, or else chose not to participate in them for a variety of reasons. Sometimes, they wanted to avoid the humiliation that they foresaw in not being able to reciprocate in kind. Some did not want to become, or be seen to be, an economic burden, and yet others sought to avoid passing on the loss of lian and mian to the entire extended family. As one villager explained:
I am the oldest but also the poorest one among my siblings. In the old days, my younger brothers and sisters, nephews and nieces would all show great respect to me. But now it is all very different – they don't see me as a brother and uncle to be respected. They don't deal with me much. Maybe they are worried that I would borrow money from them, but I would never do that – I would rather go begging on the street if I had to. They don't come close to me as if I am stinky … Nowadays only money matters. Your family is not family; relatives are not relatives if you are poor.Footnote 43
Underlying these experiences is the profound change in the nature of chaxu geju alluded to above, namely the substitution of moral reciprocity, which previously bound people together, with financial reciprocity. This inevitably means that people in poverty who are unable to reciprocate are cut off from the wider society, as explained by one township official named Zhao:
Previously, people tended to group themselves into various social categories, for example, patriarchal clans, Party membership. Within the same category, people tend to be closer to each other … But now, all the other categories become less important. There are only the rich and the poor!Footnote 44
Some people in poverty did their best to conceal their perilous financial circumstances, aware that poverty not only meant loss of lian but also denied them access to the supports traditionally inherent in the chaxu geju system. Zhang Jinwang was a case in point. In his late 50s, Zhang was in debt because of longstanding sickness but concealed this fact:
If I don't pretend to be rich, I will lose more … The rich look down the poor … I feel uneasy talking to rich people and there is no reason for them to talk to me. They have everything they need. They have a great deal of mian in society. Because they are rich, society favours them … They have guanxi and money to buy dibao … The poor can only hide like mice.Footnote 45
These findings are consistent with the initial speculations that even in rural China, chaxu geju has mutated from a system built on moral obligations to one based on financial reciprocity in which social class is challenging family as the pre-eminent mode of association. The implication for those experiencing poverty is that they are now excluded from support mechanisms that would, in earlier times, have served as an informal system of social protection. As important, while poverty may always have negatively affected mian, although to a lesser extent than in today's materialistic world, it would not necessarily have resulted in a loss of lian. Today, however, poverty is construed as a moral failing which necessarily affects lian and risks bringing shame and loss of face to the entire family-oriented self.
Dibao and the Absence of Shame
Given that poverty generally means the loss of lian as well as mian, the puzzle is why the receipt of dibao does not. Indeed, as noted above, villagers generally considered that “eating on dibao is glorious.” The reasons for this are complex but explicable in terms of the changing nature of chaxu geju. They are of two kinds: ones relating to financial status and the others to social relations.
Money, guanxi and face
First, dibao adds to a person's income and now serves to enhance mian. This was not the case when dibao was initially introduced because the sums offered in payment were insultingly small, had little impact on living standards and failed to acknowledge the degree of financial hardship experienced. One dibao recipient, speaking for others, was emphatic:
In the very beginning … dibao was so little, nobody wanted it. People would say, “you are eating on dibao! It is such a loss of lian.” Gradually the payments grew larger … People wanted it. But you had to have guanxi to buy dibao. “You have to find the temple first in order to worship the Buddha” … Now that dibao is 2,000–3,000 yuan per year, nobody laughs at you for eating on dibao. On the contrary, it only increases your mian. People envy you because you have an additional income without doing anything and it is all for free … Now only the capable people can eat on dibao. If you are poor but not covered by dibao, people will look down on you and won't want to have any dealings with you [because it indicates that] you have no money or guanxi.Footnote 46
This quotation reveals the sophisticated interaction of lian and mian: the lack of lian reflects both the humiliation attached to squalor and the absence of social recognition; increased mian is attributable to higher income but also to the status attached to being able to work the system and use guanxi to receive dibao.
The presumption that guanxi rather than need per se was the reason for dibao receipt may or may not be a legacy of the historic abuse of the system that the 2014 reforms were intended to tackle. It was, however, ubiquitous and a source of envy rather than disapproval, as the following quotations illustrate:
If you have money, you can make the devil push the millstone for you. This society is all run by money. You said dibao is for poor people and you asked whether eating on dibao is shameful? But who cares about fame and lian mian?Footnote 47 Only money is real. Eating on dibao simply indicates that you are rich and have guanxi with the officials. That's all adding to your mian.Footnote 48
In any circumstances, having money is glorious. We are all jealous of people who can eat on dibao. I hope that dibao is still there when I become older [and eligible for it] … My cousin has been eating on dibao since he got a proof of diagnosis of heart disease through a school friend who works in the city hospital. He is so lucky and capable.Footnote 49
Therefore, it seems that the social priority attached to money has eroded the moral distinctions evident in loss of face, mian and lian. Traditionally, both mian and lian were associated with exemplary behaviour somewhat irrespective of financial status: mian increased by demonstrable competence and knowledge, especially when accompanied by modesty; and lian lost through immoral behaviour.Footnote 50 The use of guanxi was discrete, a natural component of reciprocity which, if used with exploitative intent, could lead to loss of lian. As seen with respect to dibao, the presumption is that receipt is owing to guanxi, and receipt adds to mian with no loss of lian. Indeed, lian may even be enhanced to the extent that receipt of dibao tacitly signifies approval by the village elites. As a further consequence, persons in poverty who did not receive dibao were doubly stigmatized: losing mian on account of their poverty and lian because they lacked guanxi and social recognition.
Social hierarchy, self-interest and the family-oriented self
As already noted, the villages in Sky County all chose to direct dibao towards elderly, sick and disabled people, while allocation decisions were taken not by village committees, as legislators had anticipated, but by the Party secretary. This top-down administration was justified on grounds of efficiency and paternalism. The following statement by a village secretary is typical:
The village is an acquaintance community. We all know each other so well, therefore there is no need to select dibao recipients through villager representative meetings. Usually, we [the village leaders] nominate a few people as candidates; then we visit them in their household and ask whether they want to eat on dibao. If the answer is yes, we will fill out all the forms, put together all the application documents, and write the application letter on their behalf.Footnote 51
Xue, the head of committee in another village, was explicit about paternalism: “Village leaders are parent-like. We must watch all steps in the dibao process to make sure that applicants don't make a mess.”Footnote 52
The fact that there was so little opposition to this strategy, which was at odds with legislative expectations to stem abuse, was owing to three factors: first, the traditional acceptance of the immutable hierarchy of the state and officials, as representatives of the state, exerting power over people; second, people's associated ignorance as to the details of dibao; and third, their general contentment that benefit should be indeed directed at the elderly and sick.Footnote 53
Targeting elderly, sick and disabled persons, rather than people in poverty per se, had the tacit approval of the Sky County civil affairs bureau. For local officials, it simplified working procedures by removing any requirement to assess need accurately. Moreover, the effect of universalizing the benefit based on age was to minimize village conflict, as explained by the vice-director of the county civil affairs bureau:
Although it is not a written down regulation, our county is not a single case [of dibao being implemented as pension]. I have heard that it is a common practice in all neighbouring counties, including in Inner Mongolia. As Confucius said, “we are not troubled with fears of scarcity, but are troubled with fears of unequal treatment.” Every household has older members and everybody will get old. [In addition], we respect older people and they should get more help. People who are seriously ill also need more money … These arrangements are all based on people's willingness. People don't oppose the government giving assistance to the older people and sick people.Footnote 54
In generally accepting the hierarchical ordering of entitlement – with elders placed ahead of people who were seriously ill who, in turn, were above the rest – villagers were following precepts derived from chaxu geju and the interpretation given to “the poor” (kelian de ren 可怜的人) in traditional Confucian ethics. Some people linked the pension function of dibao with filial piety and believed that it reduced the burden of supporting elderly parents and thereby increased the mian of the older generation and the mian and lian of the younger one:
One should always support one's parents until they drop. It is considered as appropriate filial piety. Now a majority of older people are covered by dibao, the government is taking responsibility for caring for one's parents on one's behalf. [Therefore] the government is saving one's lian and adding to one's mian through dibao.Footnote 55
The approach to dibao allocation adopted by villagers might be characterized as self-centred. Every villager believed that one day, when they were old, they would receive dibao. One villager, was even more explicitly self-interested, remarking: “I don't care about the others at all. It is fair only if I can eat on dibao.” However, the individual self and the traditional family-orientated self were frequently conflated in people's minds. Families often found principles of filial piety coming under threat as monetary exchanges increasingly replaced obligations made in kind. Traditionally, the welfare of older family members has been the responsibility of sons and this presumption was nominally applied in the allocation of dibao in all eight of the villages studied. This meant that older people with evidently well-off sons working in the urban sector were supposedly denied benefit. However, the strong sentiment among older villagers was that they could no longer expect to receive regular support from their children, who often had families of their own to support. Therefore, most considered that dibao, as a secure addition to the rural pension of 80 yuan per month, was crucial to maintaining face. As one 83-year-old dibao recipient, put it:
A few years ago, I fell and broke my left leg. My younger son sent me to hospital and my children spent 4,000 yuan on me … I don't want them to spend money on me. Their wives may complain. They have rarely complained in front of me, but I still feel embarrassed. It is so hard for me to ask for money from my children. I would never do it sometimes even when I am really in need. Children all have their own families and they have their children to support. Life is never easy for anyone. I am not in a position to bother them … I have been eating on dibao for two years. I didn't apply but the village head put me on the list. I am so happy that I don't need to rely on children. Eating on dibao is the least embarrassing way to get money.Footnote 56
Finally, many villagers perceived dibao as state largesse, dating back to the tradition of the benevolent Confucian emperors and the subsistence payments dispensed in the era of people's communes.Footnote 57 In addition, there was a widespread sense that at a time of growing inequality, when guanxi was being used exploitatively and when corrupt officials were drawing resources from the state, it was only fair that people at the bottom should benefit in some small way from state provision. One villager forcibly articulated this commonly shared view:
The [dibao] money comes from the state; therefore, everyone deserves it without shame. Think about it – would you feel shameful to take money from your wealthy parents when you are in need? We should of course take it for granted … Compared to the corrupt officials, dibao is trivial. If the officials are not shameful for what they received from their bad conduct, why should we feel shameful for this small amount [of money]?Footnote 58
In sum, eating on dibao was thought by villagers to be “glorious” because they believed that money was “glorious,” as a pre-eminent source of mian. Moreover, to the extent that dibao was acquired through guanxi, there was no longer any stigma or loss of lian attached to receiving dibao, although it may well have provoked envy among those unable to access the benefit. However, everyone had the hope that they would live long enough to become eligible for dibao and carried the belief that if so, this would enable the family to better fulfil the obligations explicit in the principle of filial piety. For this, they were generally grateful to the state.
Discussion and Conclusion
Although small in scale, this study nevertheless has both international and national significance. It adds to recent international literature which suggests that shame that is contingent on poverty is a painful component of the experience of poverty and has detrimental consequences, including further eroding the sense of agency of people in poverty and reducing their social capital. The study's findings demonstrate, too, that poverty-related shame is not simply an individual emotion but one that reflects the judgements and exclusionary behaviours of those in the wider society. The processes involved which result in the social exclusion of people in poverty are culturally bound and, in China, have been shown to reflect both recent changes in political and social priorities as well as long-standing cultural practices that frame social relationships in ways that are perhaps globally distinct.
No one study can, of course, provide a definitive account of social processes as complex as these in a country as diverse as China. Readers are therefore encouraged to reflect on the resonance of these findings with their own experience and knowledge. Hopefully, they will feel moved to undertake further research on the poverty–shame nexus to add to the discussion of the findings below.
Turning to dibao, as an example of a social assistance scheme that happens to be the world's largest, the study provides evidence that the provision of cash benefits is not necessarily stigmatizing for those who receive them. Equally, this does not demonstrate that China has discovered the means of de-stigmatizing social assistance, because the reasons why dibao does not attract stigma are also reasons why dibao fails to have much impact on poverty rates: namely, it does not reach the people for whom it is intended.Footnote 59 Earlier studies conducted in Stone-bridge Village in south-west China found that dibao had been co-opted for the purposes of village governance, with payments made in return for political support, as a reward for good behaviour and to “quieten” potential “trouble makers.” A different rationale for provision is evident in the eight villages studied in Sky County in Shanxi province. There, dibao has effectively been converted from a social assistance scheme based on demonstrable need to a tax-based, universal pension that ostensibly also responds to age-related disability. The result is a system that is simpler to administer and which attracts popular support because it is perceived to be available to everyone and assists families in coping with the obligations of filial piety in a rapidly changing world.
In both Sky County and Stone-bridge Village, social harmony, or social control, was prioritized over the eradication of poverty; significant numbers of villagers who were eligible for dibao according the national criteria were denied it locally. In both cases, the local cadres followed the Confucian logic that inequality is politically more dangerous than poverty. If replicated widely, as statistics suggest is the case, this is likely to frustrate China's attempt to end extreme poverty by 2020.
Interestingly, dibao in Sky County was de-stigmatized in a very different way than in Stone-bridge. In the latter, local cadres thought that it was important to maximize the turnover of benefit. This, it was considered, avoided the creation of a static welfare class that might attract the opprobrium of the local community while also offering the villagers the hope that they might soon themselves be receiving benefit. Cadres in Sky County have chosen a long-term strategy that might succeed in fostering intergenerational solidity and which reflects traditional Confucian values in terms of favouring elders. Both strategies rely on top-down governance and on guanxi. As noted above, guanxi is interpreted as social recognition, at least by recipients of dibao, and may even add to their lian. Historically, this might not have been so. Either strategy could be deemed to counter the Confucian code that demands the highest ethical standards from public officials. It will be recalled that in 2012, Sky County was pilloried in the national press for corrupt dibao administration. Technically, mal-administration is still rampant. Whether this should count as corruption is a moot point and, politically, may depend on whether the Xi Jinping government truly prioritizes poverty eradication over social stability. Insofar as dibao has been de-stigmatized by divorcing de facto eligibility from poverty, current attempts to improve its targeting may mean that the stigma associated with poverty spreads to dibao.
Returning to poverty-related shame and its manifestation in Chinese society, the indigenous concepts of face, lian, mian and chaxu geju, proved powerful explicans when linked to recent political and social trends. The socialist market economy initiated under Deng Xiaoping in the 1970s is credited with the sustained economic growth that China has enjoyed and the historically unprecedented fall in poverty. It ended collectivism, prioritizes individualistic advancement, rewards the accumulation of individual wealth and has stimulated a culture of conspicuous consumption. Economic success is demanded and rewarded with high mian. Loss of mian is an unavoidable concomitant of poverty. Moreover, the study showed that even in rural China, poverty is now considered to be owing to individual failure amounting to a lack of integrity that results in the loss of lian. Moreover, the effects of chaxu geju and family-orientated self are that the loss of face is unbounded, spreading by a form of social contagion. Individuals resist this loss of face by seeking to apportion blame and by avoiding interaction with those whose economic status is worse. Whereas chaxu geju once meant relationships were ordered by kinship and place, the ordering is increasingly according to economic status. Furthermore, guanxi, once the result of tacit reciprocity based on moral behaviour, is progressively a measure of economic influence and, as such, people with limited means are automatically excluded from the possibility of any reciprocity. This is itself a further source of shame.
To conclude, focused on poverty and shame, the research has also illuminated the changing structure of social relationships in China. With respect to poverty, politically its continued existence is recognized by the political leadership to be a tacit criticism of the socialist market economy and so must be eradicated by 2020 through top-down policies. But, how times have changed. Under Maoism, people in poverty were deemed to be making an economic sacrifice to benefit China's future development. Confucius saw poverty as evidence of a poorly run society and it was rulers who nominally lost lian as a result. In today's China, people in poverty are blamed and shamed. They have no lian and little mian; their “face is on the ground.”
Acknowledgements
We benefited enormously from working together with our team colleagues, Elaine Chase, Grace Bantebya, Florence Muhanguzi, Sony Pellissery, Sasi Dhar and Zhang Huanhuan. This work is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council/Department of International Development (ESRC/DFID) (grant number RES-167-0557).
Biographical notes
Lichao YANG is associate professor in the School of Social Development and Public Policy, Beijing Normal University. Her research interests include social policy, poverty, gender and development, and environmental health.
Robert WALKER is professor in the School of Social Development and Public Policy, Beijing Normal University, and professor emeritus and emeritus fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford.
Jian XIE is associate professor in Guizhou Education University. His research interests include poverty, dignity and rural development.
