Itacha, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013. xxi, 207 pp. (Figures, table.) US$24.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-8014-7864-2.
New forms of urban poverty in China have received much research attention in recent years. This is not surprising because Chinese cities, after three decades of market reform, have become key sites to observe extreme forms of socio-spatial inequality. Most of the scholarship, however, invokes generic vocabulary, such as “urban poverty” or “the poor,” to capture rising inequalities. The existing literature, mostly based on surveys of the “poor population,” has produced a particular kind of knowledge that portrays the poor in China as victims of neoliberal reforms, just like their counterparts in other countries. Relying on quantitative surveys, sociologists examine patterns of social stratification, while geographers map patterns of spatial segregation. Two groups of people and the space they inhabit loom large in the social science scholarship on poverty in China: laid-off workers living in decaying danwei housing compounds and migrant workers settling in urban villages (chengzhongcun). We learn from the literature quite a bit about social stratification and spatial segregation, but somehow, the narrative is often flat and what we do not learn is the specificity of the Chinese urban poor.
The Specter of “the People” is a critical intervention in the literature on urban poverty in China. Based on more than two years of extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Harbin, one of the major cities in the rustbelt of northeastern China, this book offers a much richer account of the historically specific conditions that have produced the category of the new urban poor, such as laid-off workers and migrants. The author deliberately avoids using generic vocabulary such as “the poor” or the “poor population.”
Instead, the author chooses to use “the people” (renmin). This shift from “the poor” to “the people” opens up a whole array of analytical possibilities for investigating the complexity of urban poverty in China today.
The main question of the book is deceptively simple, that is, who are “the people” (renmin) in today’s China? As the chapters demonstrate, “the people” is a contested category and it has always been exclusive, along gender, urban vs. rural, and state vs. non-state divides. The “people,” since the beginning years of socialism, have included mostly full-time male workers employed in state-owned enterprises. Women, part-time, contract-based workers, and workers employed in collectively owned enterprises have been often excluded. Moreover, the entire rural population is excluded from the category of “the people.” While many of “the people” today are laid off, they can still make powerful claims to the state demanding various social security programs to improve their condition. Other poor groups cannot make the same claim as former industrial workers. In other words, not all poverty has the same urgency for the state.
Many former workers have become destitute in China’s thriving market economy, but because of their past—as “masters” of the country, the laid-off urban workers do not easily accept their position at the bottom of the new socio-economic hierarchy. This book describes, in vivid details, how laid-off urban workers believe that they just had “bad luck” and their colleagues who got rich simply had “better luck.” They do not see themselves as a separate class from the new rich. Moreover, the laid-off workers and their families are eager to “participate” in the new market economy, by investing their meager savings in the stock market and in properties. Although most of them cannot afford a new home, residents in the poor neighbourhood of Hadong, the primary fieldwork site of the book, talk all the time about moving to a better apartment. A few of them succeeded, but most have failed. Thus, as the book reveals, this poverty group of urban laid-off workers is full of contradictions, as they are caught between hope and despair, ambitions and structural disadvantages.
Most works on urban poverty in China have adopted the theoretical framework of neoliberalism and the language of policy intervention. In many of the accounts, China’s new urban poor live in shantytowns, and they are just like residents in the ghettos in the US, favelas in Brazil, and slums in India. The Specter of “the People” stands out in the literature, because it argues, clearly and powerfully, that China’s urban poor are different because of their past as “the people” and “masters” of a socialist country. This book theorizes these historical and context-specific conditions of the poor, and by doing so, it goes beyond the standard narrative of neoliberalism and dispossession.
Xuefei Ren
Michigan State University, East Lansing, USA