Democratic appraisal at a villagers’ group meeting in 2015, photo by Christof Lammer.
China studies has suggested that the minimum livelihood guarantee (dibao) was originally designed as a market-oriented response to transformations of labour (mass layoffs, peasant proletarianisation and associated unrest) but later revamped to only combat extreme poverty. Scholars have often attributed such changes to leaders’ proclaimed rationalities, their hidden intentions or citizens’ resistance. Instead, Christof Lammer’s ethnographic insights into dibao policy in a village in Sichuan show how this policy’s designed links to labour were erased and transformed through different methods of bureaucratic targeting. For a time, dibao was even integrated into an alternative political project that aimed at achieving rural development through the decommodification of labour. Studying social policy as a knowledge process thus uncovers how its sociotechnical links to labour reconfigure it as an answer to the social question.
Lammer, Christof. 2023. “Social Policy as Knowledge Process: How Its Sociotechnical Links to Labour Reconfigure the Social Question.” Global Social Policy: https://doi.org/10.1177/14680181231210158. [Open Access]
Ethnologie Chinas 