Janet Chen's new book uncovers a world occupied by the frozen bodies of the homeless, loitering beggars barely covered in tattered clothes, and sprawling slums on the fringes of industrial districts. By placing the poor at the center of her inquiry, Chen emphasizes the human element in her sophisticated, multilayered, and thought-provoking history of the culture of poverty and the politics of poverty relief in modern China. Her heart-wrenching stories of people who struggled on the edge of subsistence will also make Guilty of Indigence a compelling read for scholarly and nonacademic readers alike.

Chen's book begins with the late Qing reforms of the early 1900s. It shows that, despite being confronted with political crises and declining resources, imperial officials pledged themselves to save their people from poverty and hardship. During this time, however, the meaning of poverty and the methods of poor relief underwent fundamental changes. As Chen points out, being poor was no longer perceived as the result of economic misfortune, but instead became a mark of moral failure and criminal behavior. The traditional solution—a combination of family support, private charity, and subsidies from the paternalistic imperial government—was deemed inefficient. Therefore, municipal officials established new institutions such as workhouses (or poorhouses), which “employ[ed] different levels of coercion, combining education and moral edification with punishment for past crimes, deterrence to prevent future misconduct, rehabilitation through labor, and job training for self-sufficiency” (p. 43). In chapter 2, Chen shows that intellectuals in early Republican China, especially sociologists, launched a fervent search for what they called “scientific charity,” based on empirical research and social science models. Their research findings subsequently provided the knowledge base for Nationalist officials in the 1930s, who used poor relief to experiment with social engineering and who transformed workhouses into social laboratories, all meant to mobilize the idle workforce in order to revive China's dire political economy. The next three chapters cover the tumultuous period spanning the ambitious Nationalist Nanjing decade, the Japanese occupation, and the civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists. These crises greatly worsened poverty and severely reduced the government's capacity to manage relief efforts. At the same time, Chen convincingly argues that the Nationalists, Communists, and those who collaborated with the Japanese occupation all shared the belief that poverty could be alleviated through labor and discipline.

By highlighting urban poverty as “lived experience,” Chen's book reminds us that the effects of modern Chinese relief practices’ effects on the poor were tangible, varied, long-lived, and contingent upon local conditions. One of the positive effects was that institutions like the workhouse “offered potentially new sanctuaries and new sources of relief, on a more permanent basis than seasonal shelters and soup kitchens” (p. 33). But an obvious drawback was that custodial detention had become an acceptable and even laudable form of poor relief since the turn of the twentieth century. More importantly, Chen argues that, as “productive labor became a condition of social citizenship” (p. 3), those who subsisted on others' labors risked becoming social outcasts. This notion of social citizenship and a belief in the transformative power of labor and the utility of coercive methods continue to shape poverty relief practices in reform-era China today.

Chen grounds her story in the treacherous environments of Beijing and Shanghai. Chen suggests that, at least before the Japanese invasion in 1937, the factors that engendered poverty differed from one city to the other. In Beijing, economic recessions provoked by the political chaos of the early Republican and warlord period devastated the local economy, creating an army of poor whose ranks were swelled by bankrupt Manchus, discharged soldiers, and peasants who were uprooted from villages by natural disasters and fighting between warlords. In contrast, Shanghai attracted rural laborers who flocked to work in its urban factories. But a factory job at the time did not guarantee financial security; on the contrary, it turned desperate peasants into the urban poor. As for the administration of poverty relief, matters in Beijing seemed more orderly and state-centered, while relief work in Shanghai was fraught with tensions. For example, Chinese officials were willing to commit resources to poor relief, but administrators of foreign concessions “insist[ed] that poor relief, even on an emergency basis, was not their responsibility” (p. 143). Similarly, the poor in Beijing seemed willing to accept detention and labor training programs, but the poor in Shanghai, exemplified here by hut dwellers, put up a vigorous fight against government attempts to demolish their shanties, employing canny tactics such as “appealing to the notion of rights, invoking the law, hiring lawyers” (p. 121), and even sending telegrams to Chiang Kai-shek. Since Chen's “tale of two cities” offers an interesting regional comparison, curious readers may want to know what local politics and social dynamics account for such contrasts between orderly Beijing and dynamic Shanghai. Moreover, the “urban poor” in Chen's book are represented by disparate groups such as beggars, vagabonds, refugees, and shanty dwellers. An exploration of intra-group conflicts and alliances would add another important dimension to readers' understandings of the culture of poverty in modern China.