Seeing the Poor, Re-reconfiguring Welfare: Labour Migration and the S...

Ethnographies of the state have shown that policy, even if centrally designed, is continuously made during implementation. Reconfigurations of welfare, such as the nationwide introduction of Minimum Living Allowances (dibao 低保) in rural China in 2007, are further reconfigured in bureaucratic practice. Based on interviews and participant observation, this paper reconstructs and analyses how state officials and other citizens in a township in Sichuan Province have practiced the programme both before and during a push for ‘standardisation’ (guifanhua 规范化) in 2015. In particular, it spotlights the bureaucratic challenge of identifying the needy, if households are considered as the relevant unit and characterised through flexible, migrant labour. Different methods of knowing reconfigure the under- and over-implementation of certain criteria, and thus state assistance for those who stay behind. Welfare is thus shaped through the specific bureaucratic procedures through which the poor are seen and constituted by the state and through which state officials and citizens envision and perform the state.