Targeted Poverty Alleviation: How State Engages with Society in Chinese Villages?

• In Event: The Politics of Combatting Poverty

Abstract

Based on the conventional state-society scholarship, the state has autonomous power and seeks to extend its infrastructure power through penetrating the society and implementing its actions across its territories. However, few studies focus on the variation in the degree to which the state succeeds in extending its arms to the society under different circumstances. Moreover, state and society are not always playing a zero-sum game. The recursive state-society interactions reshape both state and society in a dynamic process through various participatory institutions and practices. In this study, I use the Chinese poverty alleviation campaign (2014-2020) to examine the underlying patterns of state-society engagement and to explain why and how the same campaign succeeds in one village but fails in another. Drawing on a wide array of qualitative and quantitative data, including in-depth interviews, participatory observation in identified poor villages, and an original rural household survey conducted at 295 villages in China, I argue that the outcomes of state-mobilized campaigns are contingent on whether the engagement between state and society are constructive or destructive in making or breaking social capital across different settings. This study contributes to the literature on state-society relations and proposes a theory of "constructive vs. destructive engagement" in campaigns.

Author

• Xin Han, University of Pittsburgh