| Summary/Abstract |
In semi-industrialized rural China, villagers are getting together to
create their own micro welfare state. In response to inadequate state
support for the poor, disabled, and especially elderly of the village,
entrepreneurs form rotating credit associations and underground banks
that fi nance welfare schemes exclusively for those who hold a household
residency ( 戶口 hukou) in their village. Most of these schemes eschew
any formal engagement with the state, but where money, legitimacy,
and social stability are involved, the state is never far away. Th is paper
examines the development and propagation of these highly successful
nonstate welfare funds in parallel to the seminally unsuccessful state
eff orts at encouraging philanthropy, and reports on recent state eff orts
to co-opt and control this flourishing, indirectly contentious, civil
movement. Th e fairly gentle nature of state-society interactions to date
shrouds an implicit contest over political space at the grassroots level.
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