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Post-Mao market reforms in China have led to a massive migration of rural peasants toward the cities. Officially denied residency in the cities, the over 80 million members of this "floating population" provide labor for the economic boom in urban areas but are largely denied government benefits that city residents receive. In an incisive and original study that goes against the grain of much of the current discussion on citizenship, Dorothy J. Solinger challenges the notion that markets necessarily promote rights and legal equality in any direct or linear fashion

This groundbreaking book powerfully humanizes the little-known urban workers who have been left behind in China s single-minded drive to modernize. Dorothy Solinger traces the origins of their plight to the mid-1990s, when the Chinese government found that state-owned factories were failing in large numbers in the face of market reforms just as the country was about to enter the World Trade Organization. Under these circumstances, leaders urged firms to lay off tens of millions of previously lifetime-employed, welfare-secure, under-educated, middle-aged employees. As these dislocated people were left without any source of livelihood, the regime settled on a tiny welfare effort, the Minimum Livelihood Guarantee (dibao), to provide some support and, most important from the viewpoint of the leadership, to keep them quiet so that enterprise reform could proceed peacefully. Solinger explores the induced urban poverty that resulted and relates the painful struggle for survival of these discarded laborers. She also details the history and workings of the dibao and its missteps, as well as changes in policy over time. Drawing on dozens of interviews, this book brings to life the urban workers who have been relegated to obsolescence, isolation, and invisibility by China s quest for modernity

Introduction: state policies, castes, and agency / Dorothy J. Solinger -- Polarization: scope, causes, manifestations -- China's uphill battle against inequality / Wang Feng -- Convergence and divergence among the rich and the poor / Li Zhang -- Portraits of the urban poor -- Banish the impoverished past : the predicament of the abandoned urban poor / Dorothy J. Solinger -- The passionate poor : foxconn workers invited as volunteers / Mun Young Cho -- On the rough edge of prosperity : informal migrant recyclers in Beijing / Joshua Goldstein -- The upper reaches of the urban rich -- China's party kings: Shanghai club cultures and status consumption, 1920s-2010s / Andrew David Field and James Farrer -- Corruption : anti-corruption, and the dynamics of class formation in post-Mao China / John Osburg -- Conclusion: urban polarities : inequality, social mobility, and the role of the state / David S. G. Goodman -- Index -- About the contributors

Cover -- Half Title -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Part I: Policy Making and Policy Conflict over Reform -- 1. Economic Reform via Reformulation: Where Do Rightist Ideas Come From? -- 2. The Fifth National People's Congress and the Process of Policy Making: Reform, Readjustment, and the Opposition -- Part II: Experiments in the Urban State Economic Bureaucracy -- 3. Commercial Reform and State Control: Structural Changes in Chinese Trade, 1981-83 -- 4. China's New Economic Policies and the Local Industrial Political Process: The Case of Wuhan

(...) Xi has garnered such an outpouring of journalistic attention—aptly dubbed of late "Chairman of Everything"—that he would seem to need no further scrutiny. Indeed, the man now holds a startling total of 12 top positions in leadership bodies, five of which were invented since his taking power in late 2012 (or, perhaps that were invented for him). He has placed himself (or has been placed?) in charge of the economy, in a move that eroded the authority of the Premier, the official who in the past managed this sphere of work; he has also reorganised both the military and—at the March 2018 session of the National People's Congress—the cabinet. In the wake of that People's Congress meeting, a number of aspects of Xi's rule have become ubiquitous representations seen repeatedly by anyone who reads about China. These features are: an overweening reach for power and control; a now unquestioned capacity to legitimate his programs and policies by reference to an inchoate "China Dream"; and a near obsessive drive—distinguished by a high degree of repressiveness not seen in some 40 years in China—to keeping society quiescent (...). The papers in this collection challenge this boilerplate delineation in several ways. In the first place, the pieces breathe life into what have become truisms for students and observers of today's China. They do so as they show how the several urges and objectives we encounter in writing about Xi have–or have not–become instantiated in some of the performances of officialdom. They look not at generalities but at specific areas of politics, and they document a few of the implications and the blowback (in religion) they have engendered. But secondly, and more critically, they interrogate the measure of Xi's capacity to innovate, as opposed to his ability to intensify. Readers will find that these essays provoke some reconsideration of the role this new "helmsman" (in the mode of Mao), as Xi has been termed, has in fact been able to chisel out in his five-plus years in power so far. The authors of the papers, all political scientists, are newly-minted scholars, recent recipients of the Ph.D. But while they are up-to-date in their analyses and conversant with methodologies and approaches of the present, each of them displays a firm grasp of the history of the field of Chinese politics and of politics in China as they have transpired over the decades (...). (China Perspect/GIGA)