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

在James Ferguson的指导下，研究生Mun Young Cho将在中国东北的二线城市哈西进行贫困研究。她将重点关注中国后期社会主义制度下的增长和差异化发展过程，并研究国家治理城市贫困项目中如何管理贫困。她将研究三个不同的穷人群体：（a）城市下岗工人和养老金领取者，（B）农村移民，（c）其他以前的外来者（在毛泽东时期被称为外来者）。她还将研究地方政府中与穷人打交道的国家官员，了解他们如何对城市穷人进行分类，调节城市贫困，并制定贫困知识。通过参与观察、访谈和文本分析，她将在哈西的地方政府办公室、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，在中国度过了两个夏天，建立了联系，并获得了当地的联系，为这项研究做了广泛的准备。这项研究很重要，因为它将是美国第一个对中国城市贫困进行民族志研究的项目之一。基于学者。民族志方法使研究人员能够超越简单的调查方法，了解不同群体如何看待彼此，如何处理彼此。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以及与国家的关系中有共同的利益。该研究将有助于贫困，后社会主义和新自由主义的政策辩论，把贫困的历史背景下，并详细说明后期社会主义转型的主要困境，在当代世界的许多地方发生的过程。该研究还将有助于了解中国大城市中心以外城市的经济和社会状况。最后，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.