Who Deserves to be Minimally Alive in Chinese Cities? Urban Decisions on the Minimum Livelihood Guarantee

• In Event: 127 - Section on Inequality, Poverty and Mobility Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Paper Session: Table 17. Poverty II

Abstract

In 2012 fieldwork in one city, plus in several official documents from autumn 2012, there are grounds for making an inference that the urban minimum livelihood guarantee program [for short, the urban dibao] was under attack, and that orders had come (from somewhere--source as yet unclear) to economize on the spending for it; to wipe out corrupt behaviors linked to its allocation; and, more strictly than previously, to target only the most “deserving” among the indigent (i.e., those unable to work and without any legal supporter), weeding out people of working age and full body (i.e., those who, though they are without work, are not disabled).

This paper explores several factors (for which data are available) that might explain, or at least be correlated with, these shifts. The goal is to try to gain some new, ideally systematic understanding about cities’ handling of their funds for dibao disbursements (and, correlatively, their treatment of their indigent populations).

Authors

• Dorothy Solinger, University of California-Irvine

• Ting Jiang, Metropolitan State University-Denver