| Abstract: | This paper investigates whether the 22 million or so urban recipients of the Minimum Livelihood Guarantee (the zuidi shenghuo baozhang), whose per capita family income falls below a locally set poverty line, can be called a ‘class’. It also explores if they experience ‘class consciousness’. It draws on theoretical writings on class and class consciousness, and on some seven dozen unstructured interviews in households of urban dibao recipients in Lanzhou, Guangzhou, Wuhan, and three smaller Hubei cities in 2007–2010, mainly using material from 2010. It finds that, unlike the former working class, while these people do not comprise a ‘class’ as such, their consciousness of their plight, stripped bare of all the illusions that clouded it in Maoist times—again as distinguished from the bygone working class—is more faithful to their actual circumstances than it is specious. |
