On the Border between “the People” and “the Population”
On the Border between “the People” and “the Population”
This chapter delves into the contestation between the poor and government officials over the management of urban poverty by focusing on the actual workings of the minimum livelihood guarantee (zuidi shenghuo baozhang zhidu), colloquially known as dibao. The dibao policy emerged in tandem with the sudden increase in laid-off urban workers, not the poor in general; nevertheless, it has introduced a new rationale which holds that poverty should be measured and calculated in numerical tables, in which these laid-off workers are reduced to numbers along with other poor people. The chapter thus argues that the practices of dibao oscillate between two modes of reasoning, or “governmentality”—that is, between being on the political stage of “the people” and being in the numerical table of “the population.”
Keywords: dibao, dibao policy, minimum livelihood guarantee, governmentality, urban poverty, urban laid-off workers
Cornell Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
