Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: When does Poverty Matter? Managing Differential Impoverishments in the People's Republic of China

Stanford University, Stanford CA

Investigators

Abstract

Under the supervision of James Ferguson, graduate student Mun Young Cho will conduct research on poverty in Haxi, a second-tier city in northeast China. She will focus on processes of growing, differential impoverishment under China's late socialism and examine how poverty is being managed in the state's projects of governing urban poverty. She will do research on three different groups of poor people: (a) urban laid-off workers and pensioners, (b) rural migrants, and (c) other former outsiders (as they were known during the Mao period). She also will study the state officials in local government who deal with the poor to understand how they categorize the urban poor, regulate urban poverty, and formulate poverty knowledge. Using participant observation, interviews, and textual analysis, she will conduct her research in local government offices, low-income residential areas, and street markets in Haxi. The graduate student has prepared extensively for the research by learning Chinese and by two summers spent in China building contacts and acquiring local affiliation. The research is important because it will be one of the first ethnographic studies of urban poverty in China by a U.S.-based scholar. Ethnographic methodologies allow researchers to go beyond simple survey methods to understand how different groups come to see each other and deal with each other as they do. One of the underlying issues in this project is why the different kinds of poor people do not believe they have common interests in their relationships with each other and with the state. The research will contribute to policy debates on poverty, post-socialism, and neo-liberalism by putting poverty into a historical context and by detailing major dilemmas of late socialist transformations, a process occurring in many places in the contemporary world. The research will also contribute to knowledge about economic and social conditions in cities other than the great urban centers of China. Finally, the research program will support the education of a graduate student.