Abstract :
This article examines how local resistance against government
attempts to reduce poverty to a technical problem ironically reinforces
the precarious state of the poor. It looks at the workings of the minimum
livelihood guarantee (dibao) through mundane interactions between streetlevel
officials and poor residents in a workers’ village on the periphery of
Harbin. As the party-state’s primary policy for urban poverty, dibao has
introduced a new rationality that poverty is calculable and flexible. Urban
laid-off workers have resisted this by invoking the socialist claim that they
are “the people.” I examine how this resistance has led street-level officials
to be preoccupied with the old socialist norm of “an ability to work” rather
than with “income” as dibao’s official criterion. The new local criterion has
produced the ironic effect that urban laid-off workers, who were understood
to be dibao’s main target, have been mostly excluded from the scheme.
