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China's Old Working Class: Impoverished and Cast Aside

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Dorothy J. Solinger
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Abstract

For about a decade from the late 1990s until the early 2000s, the Chinese state commanded loss-making and other small- and medium-sized enterprises to dismiss tens of millions of older (over age 35), unskilled workers, as it prepared to join the World Trade Organization and the global market. These uncompetitive laborers were left with little or no income or benefits, and many protested. In response, the regime instituted a so-called “social assistance” program, which, this paper shows, did little to address the predicament of these people; the legacy of their layoffs remains to this day.

Keywords

workerspovertywelfaresocial assistancedibaoprotestsdismissalspensions
Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 20 , Issue 15 , August 2022 , e1
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2022

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References

Notes

1 The claim is that over 700 million were “delivered.”

2 There is no national urban poverty line. Each city determines its own line.

3 Here and below this kind of comparison ignores the far higher cost of living in the U.S. and thus the purchasing power capacity of a given amount of dollars.

4 Zhang and Tang write that the World Bank and China's State Statistical Bureau found that recipients accounted for about one third of the deserving poor. But in a sample from seven extra-large cities, just 12 percent of those who should have been given allowances got them.

5 The Civil Affairs yearbook for 2017 has just under 18 percent for that year.

6 A dibao researcher told me in Beijing on October 7, 2014 that some can scrape by in the informal labor market or through self-employment, the two occupations together amounting to around half of those counted as “employed people” (Wang Huixia, 2013, 133). Examples of survival tactics are creating websites to launch petty businesses, setting up market stalls (which could be confiscated by the chengguan (城管), urban management police), renting out parents' housing, or relying on grown offspring.

7 Interviews with head of a community dibao program, Wuhan, June 26, 2013; a Ministry of Civil Affairs official, October 9, 2014, Beijing; and Liu Yuanwen, Deputy Director of the Department of Trade Union Study at the China Institute of Labor Relations with Professor Lin Yanting, Department of Labor Relations, Chinese Institute of Industrial Relations, Beijing, October 10, 2014; emails from Han Keqing, November 23, 2017; Randong Yuan, January 25 and 31, 2019; William Hurst, February 18, 2019; Tang Jun, February 21, 2019; and Feng Chen, March 26, 2019.

8 My book, Poverty and Pacification (Solinger 2022, Chapter Ten), spells out the basis for my calculations and observations that only a small proportion of the dibao recipients might have been given pensions.

9 The amendment to the education law rendered nine years of compulsory education free (State Council of the People's Republic of China, “Compulsory Education Law of the People's Republic of China,” June 26, 2006.)