For the People or for the Party? State Building in China’s Anti-Poverty Campaign

• In Event: Distribution & State-Society in China: Social Class, Mobility and State Power

Abstract

A major challenge facing authoritarian regimes is to monitor the society and eliminate potential threats to the regime. How can authoritarian rulers achieve this goal, especially when governing a huge population as in China? Through a case study on China’s high-profile anti-poverty campaign under Xi Jinping, we find the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) utilizes socioeconomic policies to achieve the aforementioned political agenda. Based on extensive fieldwork and statistical analyses, we discover that the anti-poverty campaign contains massive state building attempts in the rural area, where the CCP’s control had been seriously undermined by the de-collectivization in post-Mao era. In order to enhance the efficiency of relief policies, the CCP constructs an elaborate information collection system on rural households, which enables comprehensive surveillance over rural citizens. Meanwhile, to facilitate the implementation of anti-poverty policies, the CCP dispatches millions of cadres to take over village governance, which replaces village-elected leaders with party-appointed bureaucrats. We argue that the information collection and the bureaucratization of village governance have significantly strengthened the CCP’s capacity in rural surveillance and agent control and essentially turned the economic policy of poverty alleviation into a political tool of state building.

Authors

• Jing Vivian Zhan, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

• Haoyue Zhou, Nanjing University of Finance and Economics