PUBLIC LECTURE: The New Underclass in China and its Management

Abstract:

Among the most portentous of the challenges confronting the Chinese Communist Party in the early years of the century is a new underclass within the municipalities. The members of this inchoate, largely unmobilized horde are one-time workers, lately let go from their jobs; underpaid and un-privileged migrant laborers from the countryside, and any others who have recently fallen into penury. But a paradox at the heart of this threat is that it is the Party's policies themselves that, sometimes inadvertently, sometimes intentionally, have been the begetters of this particular bogeyman that now so haunts the nation's ruling elite. This perceived menace in turn, has driven the leaders to devise solutions that, for the most part, have tamed and tempered the dangers these politicians so fear.

Biographical note:

Dorothy Solinger has been a fellow at the Center for Chinese Studies, University of California, Berkeley, Visiting Research Associate at the Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, National Fellow at the Hoover Institution, director of Regional Seminars on Modern China at the University of Pittsburgh (funded by the Joint Committee on Contemporary China of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council), received grants from the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People's Republic of China (funded by the National Science Academy) and the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation (administed by the American Council of Learned Societies), and the Smith Richardson Foundation, was Fellow at the The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics, and was the winner of the 2001 Joseph R. Levenson prize of the Association for Asian Studies for the best book on 20th century China published in 1999 for CONTESTING CITIZENSHIP IN URBAN CHINA. She has done consulting work for the World bank, the Henry Luce Foundation, the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs, and the Public Broadcasting System, and was a member of the Editorial Board of the University of California Press. She also served as Chairman of the China and Inner Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies.

Professor Solinger's field of specialization is Chinese politics with a concentration on political economy. In particular, she has focused on the political decisionmaking and social and political reactions to policy about economic matters. She has written on the politics of socialist commerce, the treatment of the private sector under socialism in China, the politics of inflation control, and the politics of economic reform. More broadly, she has also written on industrial policy in China, with comparative reference to similar policy in Japan and France. Her last project concerned the management of the transient peasant population in China. Her current project concerns unemployment and globalization in China, France, and Mexico. Earlier, Professor Solinger wrote on regional policy and regionalism in China and on the treatment of minority nationalites. Professor Solinger teaches courses on Chinese politics, introduction to comparative politics, East Asian politics, regime change in East Asia, and theories of the state.