Social policy as knowledge process: How its sociotechnical links to labour reconfigure the social question

Abstract

The relationship between labour and social policy is at the heart of the social question. Scholars often treat this link as either a causal relation out there or a conceptual connection in policy makers’ minds. This article examines its sociotechnical materiality instead. It follows anthropologists who ask how bureaucrats practice policy and scholars of science and technology studies who explore how social and technical aspects are interrelated in knowledge processes. China studies has suggested that the minimum livelihood guarantee (dibao) was originally designed as a market-oriented response to transformations of labour such as mass layoffs, peasant proletarianisation and associated unrest but later revamped to only combat extreme poverty. Ethnographic insights into dibao policy in a village in Sichuan show how its designed links to labour were erased and transformed through different methods of bureaucratic targeting, as well as expectations about the bureaucratic ability to know. For a time, dibao was even integrated into alternative rural development projects aimed at decommodification. Studying social policy as a knowledge process uncovers how its sociotechnical links to labour reconfigure it as an answer to the social question.

Introduction

In April 2015, the Municipal Bureau of Civil Affairs of Yinhe City, ¹ Sichuan Province, People’s Republic of China required its subdistricts, towns and townships to cancel all existing minimum livelihood allowances (zuidi shenghuo baozhang, or dibao, for short). In the name of ‘standardisation’ and ‘scientification’ of the administration, roughly 60,000 recipients of this cash benefit for the poor had to apply for review and reapproval. During this reapplication process in Daxi, I overheard the village party secretary, Wang, scold a leader of a villagers’ group for carelessly including unverified numbers in the application forms. When the group leader replied that she did not expect the township administration to examine those figures very closely, Wang told her that even the county-level Office of Civil Affairs would check them. The numbers in question were self-reported household incomes, which the township government had instructed them to include in the written dibao reapplications. Taking into account the policy design of dibao, this emphasis on income as eligibility criterion should be no surprise.

China studies has argued that the introduction of the urban dibao in 1999 marked a significant shift in social policy in the People’s Republic. Since the 1950s, programmes like the Five Guarantees (wubao) had provided some relief – but only for specific categories of people with no source of support, such as widows, orphans, elderly people without children and people with disabilities. Following the restructuring of state-owned enterprises in the 1990s, scholars and government officials produced a new kind of ‘poverty knowledge’ that conceptualised laid-off workers as ‘the urban poor’. Dibao was designed to respond to this ‘newly’ discovered phenomenon by making income the core criterion rather than the status of being unable to work (Cho, 2013: 13–16).

Thus, one would not expect the group leaders’ surprise that income was proclaimed a relevant criterion for dibao targeting. Although the dibao had been designed as cash transfers to those below a designated minimum livelihood threshold, applications in Daxi had not included self-reported income prior to the standardisation push in 2015: I had not seen it in applications presented at earlier villagers’ group meetings and my interviews with village officials and dibao recipients confirmed that it had not been required. For village officials like the group leader mentioned earlier, it was therefore unclear whether the bureaucrats at the township- and county-level administration would now use procedures to ‘see’ (Scott, 1998) the poor through income. Such knowledge processes – which include both the bureaucratic targeting of the poor and expectations about bureaucratic ways of seeing – are key to the making of social policy.

Taking inspiration from anthropological studies of bureaucracy and bureaucratic documents as well as approaches to the politics of knowledge in science and technology studies (STS), this article studies social policy as knowledge process. Different strands of STS share a general orientation towards researching the interrelatedness of social and technical aspects in knowledge processes. While some have used the notion ‘sociotechnical’ to include attention to social processes in the study of technological change (Bijker, 1997), others have questioned the very distinction and used the notion of ‘actor-network’ to include all human and nonhuman actors that together participate in a collective activity (Latour, 2005). Here, I use the term ‘sociotechnical arrangement’, following Funda Ustek-Spilda’s (2020) STS-inspired reconceptualisation of the street-level bureaucracy literature, to analyse how social policy is practised ‘in relation to and with technologies (material and technical) and other humans, with political effects’ (p. 301).

Michael Lipsky (1980) has argued that front-line bureaucrats have some space for ‘discretion’ when interacting with citizens to implement rules, laws and policies. Vague or even contradictory formulations, as well as the complexity of situations, allow and require these bureaucrats to exercise their own judgement and thereby make policy. Ustek-Spilda (2020) adds that back-office bureaucrats similarly have ‘sociotechnical discretion’ in making interpretations and decisions when interacting with the technical structures of government. When applied to social policy, this perspective draws attention to different targeting methods and forms of evidence, as well as the organisational resources they require and the leeway this grants to bureaucrats. While social policies are often designed to respond to transformations of labour, such links are maintained, erased or reconfigured when street-level bureaucrats make policy through the specific sociotechnical materiality of the targeting process.

Scholarly and political debates about the social question often revolve around competing ideas about the proper relationships between economy and polity, in particular, that between labour and welfare (see the introduction to this issue). The editors of this special issue offer a broad historical sketch that sees the decline of ‘socialism’ (the merger of polity and economy) as also affecting the ‘welfare state’ (the coordination of the interdependent spheres of politics and economy). In this historical setting, Minh Nguyen, Helle Rydstrom and Jingyu Mao observe that the recent, often precarious, integration of ever greater parts of the Global South into the orbit of capitalist accumulation goes hand in hand with ‘thin universalism’ in social policy – that is the expansion of minimal and often insufficient forms of social protection offered by the state. Social policies such as the dibao are ‘universal’ in that no specific social group is targeted. Rather, targeting insufficient income frames poverty as an individual failure to sell one’s labour power or its products on the market. As Mun Young Cho (2013: 17) argued, the dibao turned ‘workers’, the former representatives of ‘the people’, into ‘the population’, that is ‘numbers without history’. Moreover, the ‘thinness’ of such policies was designed to push individuals to try to improve and compete on the market. The editors thus emphasise that social policies such as the dibao answer the social question with market participation as the guiding logic. These debates about the framing of the social question will benefit from taking into account the sociotechnical materiality of social policy. This will bring to light how seemingly coherent answers to the social question open up unforeseen sociotechnical connections with diverse, even competing political, projects.

I make this point using materials generated during 15 months of ethnographic research between 2013 and 2015 in rural China, mainly in Daxi, a village with a population of about 1500 registered inhabitants located in Qiuling Township. People in the township regarded Daxi as neither particularly rich nor particularly poor. Likewise, the government designated neither the village nor the region at the county-level as ‘poor’. Indeed, social policy was not part of my original research plan and I did not select this village for such a study. A construction boom in nearby Yinhe (a county-level city of 100,000 inhabitants) enabled by its attractive location in a hilly part of the Sichuan basin near the provincial capital and megacity Chengdu offered some migrant workers from Daxi alternative employment opportunities much closer to their home village. Moreover, the village’s officials used its proximity to Chengdu’s middle-class consumers to pursue rural development by setting up an agricultural cooperative for ecological rice and vegetables. Initially, I became interested in this self-styled ‘ecological’ village because of the frequent interactions between supportive state officials and nongovernmental organizations (Lammer, 2017, 2018). It was only because I happened to be there during the push for standardising dibao administration in April 2015 that social policy caught my attention. Based on interviews and participant observation, my article reconstructs how bureaucrats and other citizens practised the programme both before and during the standardisation push in Qiuling Township. In particular, it analyses how the links between dibao policy and labour have been reconfigured through different methods of targeting.

I start by discussing approaches to the reconfiguration of the link between dibao and labour in China studies that focus on agendas of policy makers and resistance of citizens. The remaining sections of this article reconstruct the history of dibao policy in the township and in Daxi, tracing how sociotechnical arrangements affect this link. The first shows how sociotechnical discretion enabled village officials to take into account not only explicitly defined eligibility criteria but also the material normativity implicit in the available benefits (including some that were unrelated to labour) when selecting potential dibao recipients. The second discusses how this also opened a space to use dibao as a means of governance, in this case for pursuing a village development strategy informed by a cooperative vision of the future of rural labour. The third and last discusses how the push for standardisation introduced uncertainties about future bureaucratic practice and reshaped village officials’ sociotechnical discretion. In this knowledge process, the sociotechnical link between social policy and labour was yet again reconfigured. Building on the specific, and partly exceptional, case of dibao policy in this ecological village, I conclude by reflecting about the more general benefits of understanding the sociotechnical materiality of social policy for those who aim to address the social question intellectually or politically.

Political agendas behind reconfigurations of the link between social policy and labour

The introduction of the minimum livelihood guarantee in cities throughout the country was first announced in 1997. In China studies, a prominent narrative links this reconfiguration of welfare to profound transformations of labour relations, particularly to the restructuring of state-owned enterprises and the massive lay-off of workers in the 1990s. Before this shift from plan to market, welfare had been provided for most urban citizens through the work-unit system. While the state had offered assistance for the urban poor since the 1950s, the programme called the ‘Three Withouts’ (sanwu) targeted only the few with no source of livelihood, legal supporter or work ability at all. The dibao, in contrast, would target every urban household whose living conditions did not meet a basic standard (Solinger, 2017: 48–50).

Eight years after the urban programme, dibao was extended to rural areas throughout the country in 2007. Several China scholars have highlighted how protests by laid-off workers preceded the earlier introduction of the urban dibao programme and how social unrest among peasants who lost their land and were thus turned into proletarians preceded the later establishment of the rural programme (Chan, 2010; Zhang, 2009). Both the introduction of dibao and later reconfigurations of it have been attributed to changes in the political agenda of the Communist Party. Dorothy J. Solinger (2017), for example, observes that in 2012 dibao expenditures started to fall relative to both the gross domestic product and overall government funding. Solinger (2017: 48, 51–55) reads these numbers as indicating a shift in leaders’ intentions after the initial goal of ensuring political stability was achieved. She notes that the programme was increasingly excluding the unemployed, becoming limited to those incapable of work, and thus silently ‘morph[ing] back into a project targeted primarily at the old sanwu’ without changing its name (Solinger, 2017: 57).

While Solinger’s narrative about political agendas reshaping social policy builds mainly on inferences from statistics supplemented by interpretations of government documents, online articles and interviews, Mun Young Cho (2013: 68–92) provides ethnographic insights in the actual bureaucratic workings of the dibao programme. Adopting a Foucauldian approach focused on rationalities of governing the poor, she claims that dibao introduced a ‘new mode of subjectivity that techniques such as categorization and numerization imposed on urban laid-off workers’ (Cho, 2013: 69). She makes the provocative argument that workers were reluctant to be ‘reduced to numbers along with other poor people’ (Cho, 2013: 71). They insisted on their status as capable workers and their historical contribution to the nation. Their resistance to their state support being conditioned on poverty ‘measured and calculated in numerical tables’ (Cho, 2013: 71) contributed to the actual criterion for dibao reverting from an income threshold back to the lack of ‘ability to work’. Ironically, this excluded those for whom dibao was originally designed: laid-off and unemployed workers (Cho, 2013: 89–90).

The shared message of Solinger and Cho is that dibao policy has been transformed so that those originally targeted – the poor, and in particular, those able to work but un- or under-employed – no longer receive what they should. While Solinger’s story recounts the intended consequences of powerful villains’ plots, Cho’s story describes the unintended and tragic consequences of underdog heroes’ actions. Like Solinger, Cho thus produces a narrative about the reconfiguration of dibao and its link to labour through human agency. Although Cho’s (2013) discussion of ‘the calculating machine’ (pp. 82–84) already hints at knowledge processes, it still fails to explore the sociotechnical materiality of dibao administration.

Controversial positions on knowledge processes in bureaucracies either have emphasised the power of knowledge (Foucauldian approaches) or have negated it by pointing out that violence enables ignorance in those who can potentially exercise it (Graeber, 2012). Despite very different explanations, a critical attitude towards quantification (Shore and Wright, 2015) and simplification (Scott, 1998) is widely shared among sociocultural anthropologists, who themselves usually work ethnographically rather than with numbers and standardised methods. Akhil Gupta (2015) has argued that even successful government programmes against poverty produce structural violence as the care they provide is uneven and erratic and thus produces arbitrary outcomes. In between, more nuanced approaches have recently highlighted that standardisation and quantification do not produce standardised effects, not least due to bureaucratic actors’ numerical competence and reflexivity (Mugler, 2019). Bureaucrats not only make policy at the street level through their direct interactions with human clients in front offices (Lipsky, 1980), but also exercise sociotechnical discretion in their relations with classifications and numbers in back offices (Ustek-Spilda, 2020). The sociotechnical materiality of bureaucracy has also been explored through a focus on the production and circulation of documents (Hull, 2012). Moreover, anthropologists have realised that bureaucrats’ knowledge practices may be, after all, much closer to their own than usually admitted. Rather than being mere reductive number crunchers, bureaucrats often turn out to be rather holistic para-ethnographers (Holmes and Marcus, 2006) or para-ethnologists (Beek and Bierschenk, 2020). Taking policy seriously as a knowledge process can shed light at other ways through which links between social policy and labour are also created, maintained, reconfigured or erased.

In particular, the next two sections highlight how, prior to standardisation, bureaucratic methods of knowing potential dibao recipients granted considerable room for manoeuvre to village officials. This sociotechnical leeway consequently enabled the realisation of the normativity implicit in the materiality of available dibao benefits, thereby delinking dibao from labour yet also enabled the pursuit of a rural development strategy that relinked labour to dibao in an unforeseen way.

The material normativity of available benefits: delinking dibao from labour

The village committee had more power before the 2015 push for standardisation, a former village accountant explained to me. They only had to report the names of potential recipients to the township, which did not ask for self-reported incomes or ‘go down to the countryside’ to investigate the applications. This unwillingness or inability at the higher levels to see those applying for dibao shaped the expectations of both street-level bureaucrats and other citizens. This section will show how they used this sociotechnical leeway to decide between the competing normativities embodied in dibao policy.

Legal anthropologists have long argued that state law is not the only source of normative order. Analysing how customary, religious and state law interact, they have highlighted the plurality of registers of rules that permeate social situations. More recently, STS-inspired anthropologists have pointed out that, besides these explicitly articulated set of rules, materiality itself has normative power (Turner and Wiber, 2023). This perspective enables us to understand how the dibao policy included additional normative options for village officials that went beyond the explicitly defined criteria of neediness. In the case described here, material normativity refers to the potential material effects embodied in dibao benefits and in particular to the medical services that at one point were available in addition to the cash transfers. Dibao thus suddenly also promised to cure (or at least care for) suffering bodies.

China’s first rural dibao experiments had already started before 2007. ² This was the case in Qiuling Township, according to Duan Shuxi, who led the township’s Office for Civil Affairs and was thus responsible for the dibao programme. This woman in her 40s presented herself as an understanding leader as she told me about how village officials had used their discretionary power before the push for standardisation. She asserted that ‘basic life’ had been guaranteed for everyone in the countryside, because ‘the peasants’ (those with rural household registration) had use rights to a piece of land. Everyone could cultivate and eat rice and vegetables. The only thing they lacked was cash. A dibao experiment that started in Qiuling Township in 2003 distributed only about 10 RMB per household member – so little, she explained, that neither officials nor the common people, paid attention to the new policy.

Over the following years, the amount was gradually raised – from 10 to 20 to 30 RMB per month ³ – but Duan Shuxi said that the crucial change came in 2007, when the dibao was linked to health insurance under the ‘New Rural Cooperative Medical Care Scheme’ (xinxing nongcun hezuo yuliao zhidu). Then, ordinary people started to pay attention to dibao because the medical subsidy rate at regional hospitals was considerably higher for dibao households. This could have a substantial effect on the finances of rural households facing serious health issues. Therefore, she explained, the village officials had focused on this insurance aspect rather than the income of the households. For example, when someone suffered from cancer village officials wanted to ‘do a good deed’ by arranging dibao for the family and everyone was happy.

This story shows that those worthy of dibao were not predefined in policy documents that explicitly defined the target group of this policy through eligibility criteria. Rather, the available benefits – in this case, not only the initially very low amount of the monthly allowance but also the significant reimbursement in case of serious health issues – shaped citizens’ interest in the social policy and village officials’ search for the needy. In this specific sociotechnical arrangement, the health status of individuals became a more relevant dibao criterion than household income, thereby breaking the designed link between dibao and labour. The non-labour-related health criterion outdid the income threshold criterion, which had been designed to address the social question in terms of unsuccessful market participation (see the introduction to this issue): temporary assistance for those who had not managed to sell their labour power or its products on the market.

That village officials did not select dibao recipients solely based on the eligibility criteria defined by policy makers and higher level bureaucrats should thus not be understood as implying a conflict between central state and local state or between state and society – a persistent trope in China studies. Rather, the kind and amount of material benefits made available to dibao recipients already embodied the competing normativity.

Sociotechnical leeway for alternative rural development: relinking dibao with labour

Rural sociologists have argued that rural officials in many villages and townships with limited budgets turned the dibao into a negotiable means for governance (He and Liu, 2008; Liu, 2008). Likewise, village officials in Daxi have not only used the available sociotechnical leeway for realising the material normativity of available dibao benefits, but also made dibao policy in a way that served their development strategy of becoming an ‘ecological village’. As we will see, this relinked dibao with labour in an unexpected way.

By establishing a peasant cooperative in 2010 and declaring a transition to ecological agriculture as their goal, the village leaders attracted the attention of higher level officials. A new office and assembly building for the village committee and a paved village square were constructed prior to a visit by some of these higher ranking officials for a prestigious on-the-spot meeting. As a piece of land was needed for this project, the village officials approached the family who held the land use rights to the desired site on their allotment of collective land. One family member, a 70-year-old woman, recalled that the land the village officials had offered in return was of poor quality. It had not been cultivated for years and was full of weeds, which meant a lot of work and a very poor first harvest. ⁴ The woman thus complained to the village officials and proposed that they should provide her with ‘social insurance’ (shebao) ⁵ to compensate for the problems caused when she exchanged her cultivated plot for the uncultivated one. Instead, they offered to ‘fix a dibao’ for her.

Obviously, this woman well understood the governance dilemma of the village committee and its leeway concerning the administration of social policies. While she overestimated the village officials’ power to arrange social insurance for her, the committee, facing budgetary constraints, was willing to work the system by arranging a dibao for her in order to achieve their goal. This was not the only time village officials in Daxi used the leeway afforded by the sociotechnical arrangements of dibao policy to pursue the village’s development efforts of becoming a successful ‘ecological village’.

‘Environmental sanitation’ was considered one way to make the ecological visible to outsiders. The roads in the village had to be kept free of trash, not only for the rural citizens themselves but also to make a good impression on visitors, such as higher level officials, journalists and urban middle-class customers who valued ‘mutual aid between city and countryside’ and regularly bought the cooperative’s organic rice and ecological vegetables. Since the tax reform in the early 2000s, the collection of taxes and fees had been severely restricted. Trash collection had presented a challenge to village governance due to funding shortfalls, so the committee asked some dibao recipients to pick up trash along the village roads.

Li Yongkang and his cousin Li Yongde had both received dibao before it was standardised in 2015. As they lived next to the concrete public road at the edge of the village, the group leader asked them to pick up the trash whenever outside visitors were expected. As Li Yongde was blind, village officials called on his wife, who did not receive dibao, to clean in his stead. ⁶ In another villagers’ group, an old man picked up roadside trash and cleaned the village square in exchange for the dibao that his wife received due to a leg disability. In yet another group, which was more remote and rarely visited by outsiders, the group leader did not ask elderly dibao recipients to pick up trash. Instead, a middle-aged deaf man who received another allowance (the so-called ‘Five Guarantee Support’ or wubao gongyang), had the task of keeping the road clean. ⁷

Li Yongkang, whose dibao had been cancelled during the push for standardisation, was critical of these earlier workfare obligations. During an interview, he expressed the opinion that those who received the dibao were comparatively poor and should be respected and valued. He doubted that any state regulation existed that obliged dibao recipients to perform community work. He did not believe the village officials, who had claimed at a meeting that the township government would withdraw the dibao if one refused to pick up trash. Even one of the group leaders who was directly involved in mobilising dibao recipients for this community work, thought that this practice was not in accordance with state regulations.

When searching for relevant regulations, I found a provincial document that mentioned participation in community service as a condition for receiving dibao. It specified that those who had the ‘normal capacity to work’ and ‘without proper reason’ refused to accept wage employment offered by the government or ‘participate in work for the social and public good’ would lose their right to dibao (Department of Civil Affairs of Sichuan Province, 2009). The workfare-side of dibao practices in Daxi Village may thus appear to maintain the link between this social policy and labour as originally designed. However, I argue that this appearance is only coincidental.

Instead, dibao workfare in Daxi created a new but unplanned link to a cooperative vision for the future of rural labour. Rather than putting the emphasis on compelling anyone who could to actively work themselves out of poverty, workfare was only selectively required in exchange for the dibao. Moreover, such workfare was also required from recipients of other social policies (such as the older wubao scheme that was only available to those without the capacity to work) from which the dibao (as a benefit that was not only available for those lacking the capacity to work) supposedly marked a rupture. In Daxi, village officials only demanded workfare when it was needed to overcome budget shortages and to fulfil needed tasks in village governance, in particular those related to the village’s rural development strategy.

The strategy of becoming an ‘ecological village’ was informed by the so-called New Rural Reconstruction movement that aimed at reversing the rural-to-urban flow of resources (Hale, 2013). Intellectuals and activists involved in this movement envisioned rural development through cooperation among ‘peasants’ (nongmin) and between cities and countryside eventually making migrant labour unnecessary. Becoming an ‘ecological village’ with a peasant cooperative that not only sold organic food for a price premium but also offered ‘comprehensive services’ for the ‘community’ would eventually enable rural citizens to stay in the village with good jobs and good lives.

Both the workfare demanded in exchange for dibao and the dibao given in exchange for swapping the land were linked to this development strategy and vision for the future of rural labour. Yet, this new link between dibao and labour was not the intentional product of political agendas of either village officials or proponents of alternative rural development. Instead, it was a by-product of a complex process enabled by specific sociotechnical arrangements and shaped by the interests, decisions and agendas of a plethora of actors. These sociotechnical arrangements included not only the leeway village officials had in selecting dibao recipients, but also the materiality of the information infrastructure through which the cooperative communicated the ecological quality of its products. Daxi’s urban middle-class customers, who had organised consumer associations, were sceptical of the state’s market-oriented eco-certification schemes that supposedly enabled profit-seeking among producers and corruption among certifiers. Instead, they valued ‘personal experience’, ‘cooperation’, and ‘direct links’ with ‘the peasants’. In this constellation, clean village roads were part of the stage for performing an ‘ecological village’ during the visits of these customers (Lammer, 2023b). The coincidental quality of this new link between dibao and the vision of decommodified rural labour became clear when it started to dissolve even before the push for standardisation.

In early 2015, the township government made new monetary resources available for community services such as environmental sanitation work. This put an end to the workfare aspect of dibao in Daxi Village and to the social policy’s temporal link to a cooperative vision for labour. Later, standardisation further reconfigured the sociotechnical link between dibao and labour. At first glance, the emphasis that was then put on self-reported income finally made the designed link between dibao and the market-oriented vision for labour materialise in practice. Yet during the push for standardisation, citizens’ expectations about how higher levels of the bureaucracy saw dibao applicants and recipients became visible. This sheds light on the possibilities and limits that the sociotechnical arrangement afforded officials and other citizens in reconfiguring dibao policy and its links to labour.

Standardisation: recalibrating bureaucracy, the poor and dibao’s link to labour

When Yinhe City’s Municipal Bureau of Civil Affairs decided to ‘standardise’ the administration of dibao policy in 2015, earlier practices in villages such as Daxi were now described as ‘chaotic’ by county- and township-level officials. ⁸ For rural citizens in Daxi, this meant recalibrating their expectations about which bureaucratic methods of targeting would actually be used this time. This process of recalibration opened and closed possibilities for enacting different sociotechnical versions of the bureaucracy and the poor and, consequently, of the social policy’s link to labour.

From the State Council’s (2007) first announcement of the nationwide implementation of the rural dibao in Document No. 19 in 2007, it called for its ‘standardised administration’. The procedure this document laid out required an application by the household head, an investigation of the household’s economic situation by the village committee, and a public meeting for the ‘democratic appraisal’ of the application. The township and county levels were responsible for examining and deciding on the application and the ‘preliminary’ opinion of the village committee. The decision was then to be published in the village. This ‘democratic announcement’ was to enable ‘mass supervision’ before the money was transferred by the government. In the name of ‘dynamic administration’, the township and county governments were supposed to periodically investigate whether the households still meet the required conditions.

Yet, the central government suspected deviations from the prescribed standardised administration. In 2012, the State Council (2012) underlined the focus on standardisation and its opinions ‘concerning the further strengthening and advancing of the efforts for the minimum livelihood guarantee’ in Document No. 45. Its preamble complained that in some places, dibao work was not taken seriously enough, responsibilities were not carried out, management was not standardised, and supervision did not attain the desired goal. In the long second section, the State Council urged administrations to use standardised procedures for reviews, decisions and approvals of the allowances. In particular, it specified that applications be in writing and that the self-reported household income be confirmed with a signature. Village committees were urged to literally ‘enter each applying household to investigate’ the situation. In addition, the county government was asked to carry out ‘random household inspections’ of at least 30% of the cases they had approved.

In December 2013, the Department of Civil Affairs of Sichuan Province (2013) published an outline, referring to the 2012 document by the State Council, that described ‘standardisation’ as the primary goal and further detailed how to evaluate the economic situation of dibao households. These methods of knowing the poor included reviewing the reported incomes as well as conducting household visits and public meetings. And in April 2015, the township government published a list of 10 items which did ‘not conform with the dibao requirements’ and presented it as a clear, straightforward and purely technical matter.

But written standards and rules such as these had existed before the standardisation push. Although the central government had already called for the ‘democratic appraisal’ of applications in public meetings and also for ‘household investigations’ in 2007, there had been no such procedures in Daxi Village before April 2015. Moreover, as Duan Shuxi, the responsible township official, explained, the terms and conditions had not changed either. Therefore, it was unclear to former recipients, officials and other citizens in Daxi which procedures and which criteria would become relevant this time and which would remain ‘under-implemented’. ⁹

Different bureaucratic methods of targeting produce different versions of the poor, including some former dibao recipients and excluding others. At the same time, these bureaucratic methods also produce different versions of bureaucrats. The notion of ‘different versions’ is not to be understood as referring to clearly separated sets of people that exist prior or independent of targeting. Rather, different abilities, characteristics and relationships of multifaceted beings are made relevant or irrelevant through specific targeting practices (including negotiations about which methods to expect). These practices are assisted by technologies of different materiality, ranging from paper, pen and stamp pad for reporting and confirming incomes to databases and income statistics, and from vehicles and roads for accessing homes for household investigations to facilities for holding public meetings. The ‘multiple versions’ (M’charek, 2013; Mol, 2002) of the poor and the bureaucrats that emerge through targeting overlap, compete, exist in parallel or dissolve when certain methods are discontinued.

The next three subsections discuss how household investigations, income checks and public meetings produce para-ethnographic and number-crunching bureaucrats or temporary citizen-bureaucrats and visibly destitute, monetarily deprived or socially acknowledged dibao recipients, respectively. In the reapplication process, village officials and former dibao recipients negotiated their expectations about the bureaucracy’s ability and likelihood to enact one of these versions or the other. This intricate knowledge process shaped decisions about submitting or withdrawing as well as accepting or rejecting dibao applications; and thereby, dibao’s designed market-oriented link to labour was enacted or erased.

Para-ethnographic bureaucrats and the visibly destitute poor

Li Yongkang, a 70-year-old man who had received the dibao until the general re-evaluation, told me that he felt entitled to continue receiving state assistance due to his maimed hand. However, the village committee rejected his reapplication because he lived in a newly built house. He justified his application by pointing out that this was not his own house but belonged to his son and daughter-in-law. He was only living there because his own house was old, on the verge of collapse and actually dangerous to live in. The village leaders explained that this time, the township officials would ‘go down to the countryside’ to investigate every single household. They would call the old man an ‘idiot’ during the household inspection when they saw the new house he was living in. The township officials would also scold the village officials who had forwarded an ‘unreasonable’ application from someone who was visibly not destitute.

Different knowledge processes shape the leeway village officials have and which eligibility criteria they can make relevant or irrelevant for particular applicants. Before 2015, village officials’ observations of village life had played a key role in identifying potential dibao recipients, but the township administration had never carried out household inspections. Therefore, it was not clear to rural citizens whether such announcements were exaggerating the future practices of the township officials, who might continue to underimplement the procedure outlined by the State Council. While the announced method of household investigations would make Li Yongkang’s visible living conditions relevant, these would remain irrelevant if other methods of knowing dibao applicants, such as verifying self-reported income, were used. In the end, the village officials convinced Li Yongkang and he was dissuaded from reapplying.

Cho (2013) argues that dibao’s focus on income thresholds – the minimum livelihood standards – turned the bureaucracy into a ‘calculating machine’. Household investigations, however, have turned bureaucrats into ‘para-ethnographers’ (Holmes and Marcus, 2006: 595) ‘who are themselves engaged in intellectual labors that resemble approximately or are entirely indistinguishable from our own [read: anthropologists’] methodological practices’. Bureaucrats are not only number crunchers, but use different methods of knowing the targets of dibao policy, including household investigations that come very close to the methods of those social scientists who study social policy ethnographically.

Para-ethnographic methods such as household investigations are resource and time intensive. Even if all household members live and work in one place, this method of knowing the poor required the township government to temporarily use officials from other departments to administer social policy. If those registered in one rural household were living and working in different faraway places most of the year, bureaucrats’ para-ethnography would need to become ‘multi-sited’ (Marcus, 1995). Due to limited resources for officials’ to travel to other places, household visits in Qiuling Township remained single-sited. Thus, in the context of widespread labour migration, this method thus cannot assess if neediness was due to unemployment or underemployment despite the capacity to work. The core criteria of dibao that makes it market-oriented and supposedly distinguishes it from older forms of assistance for the poor thus cannot be made relevant. During the push for standardisation, a less resource-intensive method was announced: self-reported incomes.

Number-crunching bureaucrats and the monetarily poor

Cho (2013: 82–84) argued, following Foucault’s line of thought, that the ‘calculating machine’ installed with the introduction of the dibao reduced workers to numbers and thus turned former representatives of ‘the people’ into ‘the poor population’ and active subjects of communication into passive objects of governmentality. In Daxi, dibao applications had not included self-reported numbers for household income prior to 2015. Therefore, villagers and group leaders thought the decisions that village officials justified with references to the state’s standard and a certain level of income might be cases of ‘over-implementation’ that could be challenged. But village officials continued to warn villagers’ group leaders and applicants that township officials might call them ‘stupid’ if the numbers were ‘unrealistic’.

The application of Zhu Guoqiang, another former dibao recipient who worked as a night watchman and slept in a small gatehouse at the village’s rice mill, was among five applicants who had been rejected by the village committee because the per capita income reported for his household was too high. When the old man challenged the village committee’s rejection of his reapplication, Village Party Secretary Wang sent the responsible group leader to talk with him again. She was to explain that he had reported the household income himself, have him calculate his household’s average monthly per capita income based on these numbers, and compare it with the standard specified by the township government to emphasise that the village officials had not interfered with his application.

Later, Zhu Guoqiang participated in the democratic appraisal meeting, even though he had not been invited. He stood up and directly addressed the village accountant by his name: ‘Li Jiahua, concerning this minimum livelihood allowance, I ask one question: do the poor eat it or the rich?’ Li Jiahua answered promptly and concisely, ‘The poor’. Zhu Guoqiang exclaimed,

The poor. So, I’m asking all the villagers’ representatives and all the group leaders to come to my home and take a look. I don’t have a vehicle, either. I am not afraid to be laughed at. In the house I live in, there are only simple wooden beds and two wardrobes. I am very poor; I can’t even afford to buy clothes.

The village accountant and the village party secretary interrupted him several times, arguing that he himself had reported an annual household income above the level of the minimum livelihood allowance. Zhu Guoqiang told them that they did not have to read out the standards for him to hear: ‘I understand the policy’. He was convinced that household income was not the proper indicator for neediness.

Ultimately, Zhu Guoqiang’s attempt to enact poverty as not numerical but visible destitution, and thus make bureaucrats into holistic para-ethnographers rather than reductive number crunchers failed. But later, I learned that, in this case, the village accountant had even tried to help him. Li Jiahua had reduced the self-reported numbers on the application form. However, given the specified occupations of the household members, he explained to me that he could not possibly manipulate the numbers enough to bring the income below the relevant threshold.

Without documentary evidence of income from flexible labour, particularly among the poor, Qiuling Township, like other local governments in China (Cho, 2013: 83), used a table of income guidelines with widely known wage rates for different types of work in different regions to estimate applicants’ household income. While Cho reports that local governments’ estimates of income for certain precarious jobs were much higher than actual incomes, in this case, a street-level bureaucrat had reduced high self-reported incomes to bring them closer to the threshold. In both cases, the poor were enacted as monetarily poor, and in both cases, the bureaucracy was an estimating rather than a calculating machine. However, Li Jiahua’s back-office work shows that even this sociotechnical arrangement offered opportunities for discretion. Folded into the modified numbers on monetary income on Zhu Guoqiang’s application was Li Jiahua’s non-numerical assessment of the old man’s poverty.

Comparisons with estimated income reconfigured the link between dibao and labour. When estimated rather than actual income became the baseline, dibao was no longer available to those who were unemployed, under-employed or owed back wages. Even if the income criterion appears to reduce those applying for dibao to mere numbers and the poor population, estimates again render status – now specific professions in specific localities – the relevant criterion. The democratic appraisal meeting just mentioned produced yet another version of bureaucrats, the poor and dibao’s link to labour.

Temporary citizen-bureaucrats and the socially acknowledged poor

After visiting applicants’ households and checking reported incomes, the village committee invited nine applicants (out of the village’s 31 former dibao households) for the democratic appraisal meeting. They were asked to present their households’ circumstances in front of villagers’ representatives and group leaders. After that, the audience cast their votes.

Out of nine applications, only one received the approval of all 26 participants. Six were accepted with 25 positive votes and two with 24. During conversations after the vote, one group leader argued that not one application from the village complied with the standards published by the township government. For example, he pointed out that the township and village officials had explained that one of the 10 disqualifying criteria was owning a motorbike. While motorbikes were still rare in Daxi Village at the end of the 1990s, by 2015, almost every adult man below 60 years owned one. Yet, one person – presumably the group leader – was alone in rejecting almost all the applications. He was disappointed in the decisions made: not a single citizen from his villagers’ group had passed the renewed application process and been invited to the democratic appraisal. In contrast to the others, he thus did not join their tacit under-implementation of this specific condition.

The votes produced through democratic appraisal thus offered yet another vision for bureaucrats to see poverty. In this case, contextual knowledge and situational assessments of temporary citizen-bureaucrats were translated into numerical votes of support and disapproval. Yet, it remained illegible to higher level officials which meanings such votes had folded into them. These could be assessments of poverty, neediness and deservingness, but also possibly something else, such as (disappointed) solidarity among village officials. The version of the socially acknowledged poor thus produced may overlap with other versions of the poor, or compete with them by bringing completely different elements into the mix that, as in this case, make the designed link between dibao and the individual capacity to succeed on the market irrelevant.

Conclusion: sociotechnical reconfigurations of the social question

Scholarly debates about the social question often analyse the link between social policy and labour as either a causal relation out there or an ideational connection in competing political visions (see the introduction to this issue). Approaching social policy as a knowledge process instead brings to light the sociotechnical arrangements that not only enable street-level bureaucrats to erase and transform the designed links to labour that policy makers inscribe into social policy but also enable and limit scholars’ constructions of causal relations between social policy and labour.

Studies of China’s minimum livelihood guarantee have, for example, argued that either policy makers or citizens transformed this social policy’s market-oriented link to labour. While the use of government statistics and documents allowed political scientist Solinger (2017) to infer that the leadership intentionally reconfigured dibao policy, the combination of ethnography and Foucauldian theory enabled the anthropologist Cho (2013) to claim that this reconfiguration was propelled by workers’ resistance against being reduced to numbers. Both pointed out how the force of human agency effectively erased dibao’s core feature of being also available for those with the ability to work but nonetheless below the defined minimum livelihood standard. In contrast, the use of conceptual tools forged in STS and the anthropology of bureaucracy shaped the argument of this article. By exploring the sociotechnical arrangements that enabled and limited the production of poverty knowledge in the administration of the dibao programme, it approached reconfigurations of the link between dibao and labour by extending the focus beyond human actors.

Before the push for standardisation in 2015, township officials left the selection of dibao recipients, within the limitations of a set quota, to the discretion of village officials. This was due to the sociotechnical challenges and costs of knowing dibao applicants. Sometimes, village officials gave more relevance to the kinds and amounts of available dibao benefits than to the explicit eligibility criteria and assessment methods, for example, when dibao was granted to individuals with serious health issues due to the insurance benefits attached to it. In such cases, the material normativity of the available dibao benefits effectively erased the market-oriented link between dibao and labour, the key design feature that supposedly differentiated it from earlier status-based forms of social relief.

Moreover, having been afforded considerable leeway, village officials in Daxi also selectively used dibao policy to pursue the development strategy of becoming an ‘ecological village’. For example, they approved dibao in exchange for a much-needed piece of land or demanded a specific kind of workfare (much-needed ‘environmental sanitation work’) in exchange for it. While not planned, dibao policy in this case became temporarily linked to the cooperative vision of the future of rural labour pursued by initiatives of the so-called New Rural Reconstruction movement, creating an unforeseen link between dibao and labour that virtually reversed the former’s orientation from market-oriented commodification to cooperative decommodification. While this very specific reconfiguration of a social policy is certainly a rather exceptional case, the more general takeaway point is to attune debates about the social question to the possibilities sociotechnical arrangements afford for the practical transformation of the designed answers.

This article explored such less exceptional sociotechnical transformations of the designed link between dibao and labour by analysing the enactment of standardisation in Daxi Village. The sociotechnical arrangements through which dibao applicants were known became an object of discussion during the push for standardisation. The proclamation of standardisation made village officials and applicants invest interpretative work in recalibrating their understanding of how higher level bureaucrats were now trying to know the poor. Targeting was a challenge, especially when members of applying dibao households engage in informal work and migrant labour in faraway places.

Different methods required different skills and different amounts of resources, produced different versions of the poor and the bureaucrats, and granted the latter different forms of sociotechnical discretion. Para-ethnographic household investigations produced dibao recipients as visibly destitute, calculating bureaucratic machines produced dibao recipients as monetarily poor and democratic appraisal meetings produced dibao recipients as acknowledged poor. While Cho (2013) argued that the original design of dibao reduced dibao recipients to numbers, my ethnographic research showed that using income as criterion did not prevent village officials from applying other methods, considering other criteria as more relevant and using their discretion in the back office to translate their judgements into modified numbers. And while Cho (2013) showed that workers’ resistance contributed to breaking the designed link between dibao and labour, my ethnographic research showed how this connection had never materialised in Daxi.

Even when the 2015 push for standardisation eventually made income relevant – the distinguishing eligibility criterion of dibao in comparison to other programmes of social relief, the sociotechnical arrangement did not afford those with the ability to work but without sufficient income to become dibao recipients. Without resources for making para-ethnographic household investigations multi-sited and without documentary evidence of actual incomes, bureaucrats resorted to estimations of incomes of migrant workers based on the declared kind and place of work. In places like Daxi, where members were registered in one rural household but lived and worked dispersed in faraway places, the calculating machine had never started to work. While bureaucrats were also number crunchers, the numbers they crunched were estimated: What mattered was status: type and place of work. Studying social policy as knowledge process thus uncovers how links between social policy and labour are reconfigured not only through policy makers’ proclaimed rationalities or hidden intentions, but through the materiality of sociotechnical arrangements.

This insight has broader implications for debates on the social question. It shows that while ruling and competing ideas may be coherent in their definitions of the proper relation between labour and welfare, the sociotechnical links that materialise in the enactment of social policy are necessarily less coherent. Social policy designed as ‘thin universalism’ to activate market participation may unintentionally become temporally attached to cooperative projects aimed at decommodifying land, labour and capital (as in Daxi Village), but also to capitalist projects of fintech companies (see Webb, this issue). Conversely, this alerts us that even social policy designed to address broader concerns of redistribution, recognition and representation can become attached to diverging projects. A better understanding of how the social question is enacted through sociotechnical arrangements is necessary, even as it shows that social policy will inevitably remain, for better or worse, beyond the full control of policy makers.