In China in the 1990s, a process began which aimed to make state and collective enterprises function more like capitalist companies. The enterprises were no longer responsible for housing, pensions, health insurance and social services; ownership was restructured and permanent job tenure was abolished. In most enterprises, the goal of reducing the workforce and increasing efficiency resulted in large-scale layoffs. In the most dramatic cases, entire enterprises were shut down. Although the economy grew rapidly, unemployment surfaced as did urban poverty. Another process that has generated poverty in urban China today is the large influx of people holding a rural hukou. Many such workers earn lower wages than those with an urban hukou, and they are not well-integrated at the destination. The book The Specter of “The People” shows how these processes materialized at a local level.
The book is primarily based on fieldwork conducted during the years 2006 to 2008 in Hadong, a decaying residential area on the outskirts of Harbin, the capital of Heilongjiang province. The main employer, a state-owned enterprise which once had as many as 15,000 employees, gradually laid off workers and was finally declared bankrupt in 2005. Many of the laid-off workers and retirees the author met described the sense of loss and frustration they felt when they were “no longer celebrated as honored workers but rather mocked as ignorant dropouts from the market economy” (p. 12). Hadong is also the home of many persons originating from various rural locations. They are (in the words of one informant), “peasants who must raise themselves and not urbanites who are raised by the state” (p. 128).
The book has six chapters in addition to the introduction and conclusion. The first chapter sets the stage by providing historical background and a presentation of Hadong. Chapter two deals primarily with the difficulties less-privileged inhabitants have in accessing and affording newly produced housing. The topic of chapter three is government programmes for the poor who hold an urban hukou. In response to the increased problems of unemployment and poverty among urban residents, China introduced a social assistance system, dibao, in the 1990s. The dibao system is presented and how it works in a local context is described.
Chapter four is about organizational changes at the street level. The residents' committee, which was outside the state bureaucracy, has officially been renamed the Community Residents' Committee and has been given new duties. Examples of these are administering dibao and providing job training for laid-off workers. This organizational change has necessitated bigger government as groups of unpaid volunteers (“gossiping grannies”) have gradually been replaced by increasing numbers of community cadres paid for through government channels; in 2008 the first newly graduated social workers began their employment in Hadong.
The rural migrants' life in Hadong is the topic of chapter five. Some of them subsist on informal, non-factory work, others are temporary workers in factories, and still others are farmers who lease land from peri-urban farmers. Many, but not all, have the option of returning to the village in which they have their hukou. Chapter six contrasts the processes that have led to poverty among urban residents and rural migrants, respectively. Tensions between these two categories of the poor have been formed over many years. The two groups rarely unite and are treated differently by the state and local street-level officials.
I think choosing to do the field work in a suburb located in the North-East was a successful strategy. This region is where the consequences of restructuring the state-owned enterprises can be expected to have been the deepest and thus most visible. One strength of the book is that the reader often comes close to the lives of the poor. I therefore think it deserves a place on reading lists for courses on contemporary China.
However, the book did not meet my expectations in other respects. First, I missed the children. No child is presented as an informant. Children are also remarkably absent in the life stories related by the adults. We can assume that one consequence of the loss of employment opportunities in Hadong has been that a substantial number of grandmothers (who no longer are factory workers) have taken on care-responsibilities for their grandchildren, thus the restructuring process has not been gender neutral. Second, I had expected that the author would describe her research method and preferably also make some reflections on its advantages and limitations. Third, not all issues and problems are unique to reform China. Factories have been shut down in many places around the world and China is not the first country that has adopted a social protection system. I therefore think the book would have benefited from the author reflecting on how the lives of the poor in Hadong are similar to or differ from the lives of persons in comparable circumstances in other countries.
