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| 1 |
ID:
154156
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| Summary/Abstract |
In 1999, the State Council set forth an urban social assistance program aimed chiefly at pacifying protesting laid-off workers and compensating for the breakdown of the work-unit-based welfare benefits that had obtained under the planned economy. While an initial goal was to ensure the political stability that would allow enterprise reform to proceed unchallenged, over time the content of the scheme shifted in line with new regime goals. First the program spread to the countryside, as the New Socialist Countryside model was installed. In the past few years, in line with a tightening of financial commitment, leaders have demanded that the able-bodied poor should work, not be succoured, and that the program’s allowances target the desperate. Also, beginning in 2014 and continuing into 2016 there has been heavy emphasis on fighting graft and corruption in the program. The paper details five alterations that have emerged – or policy slants for which earlier, less extreme changes in implementation have intensified – since Xi Jinping ascended to power. The big message here is that the regime has repeatedly reshaped this initiative to match the changing political agenda of the Party.
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| 2 |
ID:
114801
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| Publication |
2012.
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| Summary/Abstract |
This paper investigates whether the 22 million or so urban recipients of the Minimum Livelihood Guarantee (the zuidi shenghuo baozhang), whose per capita family income falls below a locally set poverty line, can be called a 'class'. It also explores if they experience 'class consciousness'. It draws on theoretical writings on class and class consciousness, and on some seven dozen unstructured interviews in households of urban dibao recipients in Lanzhou, Guangzhou, Wuhan, and three smaller Hubei cities in 2007-2010, mainly using material from 2010. It finds that, unlike the former working class, while these people do not comprise a 'class' as such, their consciousness of their plight, stripped bare of all the illusions that clouded it in Maoist times-again as distinguished from the bygone working class-is more faithful to their actual circumstances than it is specious.
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