Decentralization as a Mode of Governing the urban in china: Reforms in Welfare Provisioning and the rise of Volunteerism
In: Pacific affairs: an international review of Asia and the Pacific, Band 86, Heft 4, S. 835-855
ISSN: 1715-3379
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In: Pacific affairs: an international review of Asia and the Pacific, Band 86, Heft 4, S. 835-855
ISSN: 1715-3379
In: Pacific affairs, Band 86, Heft 4, S. 835-856
ISSN: 0030-851X
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. This paper focuses on an aspect of decentralization that typically is under-examined-that is, 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 that 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 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. (Pac Aff/GIGA)
World Affairs Online
In: The China journal: Zhongguo-yanjiu, Band 69, S. 238-240
ISSN: 1835-8535
In: Worlding Cities, S. 55-76
In: Economy and society, Band 35, Heft 4, S. 550-570
ISSN: 1469-5766
In: Urban life, landscape, and policy
World Affairs Online
In: Urban life, landscape, and policy
A look at urban professionals in post-Mao China as they balance social responsibility and individual achievement.
In: International journal of Asian studies, S. 1-4
ISSN: 1479-5922
In: International journal of urban and regional research, Band 38, Heft 5, S. 1576-1588
ISSN: 1468-2427
AbstractIn contrast to more traditional debates about voting patterns, local versus state administrations, and individual rights and participatory democracy, this article addresses the question of urban politics through an analysis of subject formation. By taking subject formation as the analytical focus, research questions about 'politics' shift from traditional ones about local or state government and the development of consensus, for instance, to ones about the constitution of subjects who are governed and govern themselves in particular ways. Using the emergence of two increasingly commonplace subject forms in contemporary China — urban professionals and volunteers — as examples, the article considers how modes of self‐regulation become political problems and also how subjects may be of the urban as well as located in the urban. The problematizations of socialist state planning have led to new governmental rationalities and technologies that not only produced new subject positions, but also new urban spaces, landscapes, economies and lifestyles. From this view, the article is an intervention into discussions about the 'where' of urban politics. It also argues that it is critical to examine politics as problematization and normalization if we are to understand what is at stake in the constitution of potential 'communities of action'.
In: International journal of urban and regional research, Band 38, Heft 5, S. 1576-1588
ISSN: 1468-2427
In: International journal of urban and regional research: IJURR, Band 38, Heft 5, S. 1576-1588
ISSN: 0309-1317
In: The China journal: Zhongguo-yanjiu, Band 64, S. 249-251
ISSN: 1835-8535
In: The China journal: Zhongguo-yanjiu, Band 57, S. 186-189
ISSN: 1835-8535
In: Pacific affairs, Band 77, Heft 4, S. 726-727
ISSN: 0030-851X
Hoffman reviews POPULAR POLITICAL SUPPORT IN URBAN CHINA by Jie Chen.
In: Social science journal: official journal of the Western Social Science Association, Band 45, Heft 2, S. 207-222
ISSN: 0362-3319