Decentralization as a Mode of Governing the Urban in China: Reforms in Welfare Provisioning and the Rise of Volunteerism

This paper considers what a Foucauldian-informed analysis of decentralization and urban transformation offers to current debates. It analyzes decentralization as a new regime of governing, in contrast to many studies that treat it as a policy process, objective or outcome aimed at alleviating some problem of centralized authority. Rather than understanding decentralization as less state governance, this paper asks how practices such as local autonomy are in fact technologies of governing the urban. Decentralization is analyzed then not simply as an absence of some central state power, either in the political or fiscal realm, but rather, as new mechanisms of governing the urban, which are linked with the regulation and constitution of subjects. The paper focuses on an aspect of decentralization that typically is under-examined: the decentralization of welfare provisioning in urban China. Under high socialism of the Maoist era, social services for urban residents were distributed by the state, through the work unit (danwei) as part of the planned economy. In recent years, however, major reforms have been put into place to diversify the ways in which social services are delivered, under a general rubric of decentralizing the distribution away from the state. Based on anthropological research in Dalian, a major port city in northeast China, this paper examines a new social practice and subject form that has emerged with new ways of caring for those in need in the city: volunteerism. By focusing on this resulting social form, the paper argues that we may better understand how decentralization is not a singular process with multiple outcomes, but rather, a complex assemblage of elements that includes technical questions about how to govern as well as normative practices of subject formation. An analytical disaggregation of these elements also allows us to avoid the assumption that decentralization necessarily contains certain characteristics, or that it will lead to particular kinds of political and social forms.

作為中國城市治理模式的權力下放：福利提供的改革與志願服務的興起

本文認為，对權力下放和城市轉型進行福柯式分析將對當前的辯論有所啓發。許多研究將權力下放看作一種旨在緩解權力集中所帶來問題的政策過程、目標或結果，爾本文將權力下放視為一種新的治理體制。本文認為，權力下放並不意味著國家治理的減少，相反，我們應該追問“地方自治”的實踐實際上是否是治理城市的技術。權力下放應該被理解為是一種與規範和構成主體相關的新的城市治理體制， 而不僅僅是某種中央國家權力在政治或財政領域的“缺位”。本文側重於權力下放問題研究中較少涉及的一個方面，即中國城市福利供應的下放。在毛澤東時代的高度社會主義體制下，作為計劃經濟的一部分城鎮居民的社會服務是由國家通過工作單位提供的。而近年來，一些旨在使社會服務的提供方式從國家分配轉為多樣化分散地提供的重大的改革已經開始實施。基於在中國東北地區重要的港口城市大連進行的人類學研究，本文探討了在用新的方式照顧城市里“需要幫助的群體”中出現的新的社會實踐與主體形式：志願服務。本文認為，通過聚焦於這一新的社會形態我們可以更好地理解權力下放，即它不是帶來多種結果的一個單一的過程，而是包含了如何治理的技術問題以及主體形成的規範實踐等多種元素在內的一個複雜組合。對這些元素進行分解分析可以使我們避免將權力下放看作是必然包含某些特性的或必然會導致某種特定的政治和社會形態。