The specter of "The People", managing urban poverty in northeast China [electronic resource]
Keywords: Cultural and Social Anthropology

This study explores poverty management in China at the turn of the millennium. It draws on ethnographic materials collected during 26 months of fieldwork in a decaying residential area of China's northeast city of Harbin. China continues to define itself as "socialist, " despite having undergone several decades of market-oriented reforms. These reforms have plunged urban workers, the one-time representatives of the socialist project, into dispossession. Such complexities, I argue, show that the management of urban poverty is not merely a technical project of alleviating individual penury, but an arena fraught with contestation over the relationship between the nation-state and its subjects. Central to this study is the figure of "the people, " a historically informed category that has profoundly shaped subjectivity in the People's Republic of China (PRC). Since the PRC's founding in 1949, the maxim "Serve the People" has been a central point of moral and political orientation, and has given both voice and leverage to urban workers. Market-driven reforms, however, have subsequently transformed many of these workers into China's "new urban poor, " particularly in the northeast. In response, impoverished workers today seek protection and recognition by invoking the claim of "the people, " i.e., the very language with which the party-state had once identified and venerated them. In effect, they have appropriated and redeployed socialist rhetoric as a protection against the chaotic effects of the market. Yet, I assert that "the people" is a floating signifier. Any claim of belonging to "the people" is contingent despite the category's semantic centrality to the PRC. The central argument of this study is that, by invoking "the people, " impoverished workers have animated historically embedded tensions within this floating signifier, illuminating unavoidable contradictions in China's management of urban poverty. Although many impoverished workers claim that they exemplify "the people, " their claim often contradicts governmental techniques that promulgate instructions regarding how "the people" should be reborn as self-managing subjects. Further, this study unveils the complex processes of differential impoverishment among urban laid-off workers and rural migrants, two constituencies who now live cheek by jowl in China's cities under severe economic duress but who rarely unite as "people" owed common state protection. The uncontrollability of rural migrants, which is the very outcome of state governance, has opened up a space for resistance which is not entirely controlled by the state. This is not a conventional study of "the poor." By making the category of "the people" my object of inquiry, I reflect historically on inequality's ties to a globally shifting political economy without presupposing the persistence of poverty in China or elsewhere as a self-evident truth. I argue that insufficient attention to the historicity of poverty marks a danger not only of reproducing received categorizations about the poor but also of missing the complexity of inequality as individual lives intersect with a changing political economy. By exploring how the historicity of "the people" haunts the management of urban poverty, this study brings greater attention to the contested voices and actions of "the governed, " which are often elided in the discussion of "governing.".