Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: When does Poverty Matter? Managing Differential Impoverishments in the People's Republic of China

在詹姆斯·弗格森的指导下，研究生Mun Young Cho将在东北二线城市哈西进行贫困研究，中国。她将专注于中国晚期社会主义下不断增长的、不同程度的贫困过程，并研究国家治理城市贫困的项目中的贫困是如何管理的。她将对三个不同的贫困群体进行研究：(A)城市下岗工人和养老金领取者，(B)农村流动人口，以及(C)其他以前的外来者(在毛时代被称为外来者)。她还将研究地方政府中与贫困人口打交道的国家官员，了解他们如何对城市贫困人口进行分类，如何规范城市贫困，以及如何制定贫困知识。通过参与者观察、访谈和文本分析，她将在哈西市的地方政府办公室、低收入居民区和街头市场进行研究。这位研究生通过学习中文和在中国度过的两个夏天为这项研究做了广泛的准备，建立了人脉并获得了当地的联系。这项研究很重要，因为这将是美国学者对中国城市贫困进行的首批人种学研究之一。人种学方法使研究人员能够超越简单的调查方法，了解不同的群体是如何相互看待和处理的。这个项目的一个根本问题是，为什么不同类型的穷人不相信他们在彼此之间和与国家的关系中有共同的利益。这项研究将把贫困置于历史背景中，并详细描述后期社会主义转型的主要困境，这一过程发生在当代世界的许多地方，从而为关于贫困、后社会主义和新自由主义的政策辩论做出贡献。这项研究还将有助于了解中国所在的大城市中心以外的城市的经济和社会状况。最后，该研究计划将支持研究生的教育。

Under the supervision of James Ferguson, graduate student Mun Young Cho will conduct research on poverty in Haxi, a second-tier city in northeast China. She will focus on processes of growing, differential impoverishment under China's late socialism and examine how poverty is being managed in the state's projects of governing urban poverty. She will do research on three different groups of poor people: (a) urban laid-off workers and pensioners, (b) rural migrants, and (c) other former outsiders (as they were known during the Mao period). She also will study the state officials in local government who deal with the poor to understand how they categorize the urban poor, regulate urban poverty, and formulate poverty knowledge. Using participant observation, interviews, and textual analysis, she will conduct her research in local government offices, low-income residential areas, and street markets in Haxi. The graduate student has prepared extensively for the research by learning Chinese and by two summers spent in China building contacts and acquiring local affiliation.The research is important because it will be one of the first ethnographic studies of urban poverty in China by a U.S.-based scholar. Ethnographic methodologies allow researchers to go beyond simple survey methods to understand how different groups come to see each other and deal with each other as they do. One of the underlying issues in this project is why the different kinds of poor people do not believe they have common interests in their relationships with each other and with the state. The research will contribute to policy debates on poverty, post-socialism, and neo-liberalism by putting poverty into a historical context and by detailing major dilemmas of late socialist transformations, a process occurring in many places in the contemporary world. The research will also contribute to knowledge about economic and social conditions in cities other than the great urban centers of China. Finally, the research program will support the education of a graduate student.