Title: Microfinance Assemblage in China
Description: By undertaking an in-depth case study in Yi County where the first microfinance program was launched in 1993, this dissertation investigates how microfinance was adopted and adapted in China through four chronologically established microfinance programs: microfinance NGOs, microfinance programs housed within national subsidized poverty alleviation loans, rural credit cooperatives microfinance programs, and commercial microfinance companies. Inspired by but distinct from the policy mobilities approach, this dissertation takes upon the notion of assemblage as the analytical framework under which the adoption and adaptation process can be conceived as four distinct, though overlapping assemblages that are constantly fluctuating and in (re)formation. The questions asked, therefore, are how these assemblages are constituted by heterogeneous elements, including policies, institutions, discourses, and practitioners? What are the attendant contradictions and externalities and how are they managed (or fail to be managed)? And what are the politically progressive and regressive possibilities that arise in the process? By illustrating how four microfinance assemblages in Yi County were produced, maintained, transformed and/or deteriorated, this dissertation focuses on the messy and complex processes of microfinance formations and reveals the not-always-coherent and sometimes even contradictory capacities of the elements common to all microfinance assemblages and the practices required to draw these elements together, forge connections between them, and sustain these connections it the face of such capacities.