Cleaning up China
Like all signatories to the Sustainable Development Goals, China is expected to half poverty in all its dimensions by 2030 but is unclear how these dimensions will be defined.
Visiting Guizhou, China’s poorest province, provided an opportunity to ask people experiencing poverty what dimensions they considered to be important. Participants were recruited purposively to join one of five extended creativity groups. Three groups of participants were engaged from a daily urban job-market, another group comprised ethnic minority villagers on an organised trip to the city, and the fifth, a middle-income group, was recruited by snowballing using social media. Altogether 42 people participated in the groups, 20 of them women. A significant minority of the participants with experience of poverty were functionally illiterate.
Thirty-five hours of groupwork generated literally hundreds of attributes of poverty based on people’s real-life experience. Groups assembled dimensions by a process of open coding: participants, working in pairs or triplets, assigned ‘Postiks’, each labelled with a single attribute, to emergent groupings which were then collectively merged into dimensions by all participants. The dimensions were then perused by participants to assess their internal consistency and then the dimensions suggested by each group were merged by the research team[1], seeking to maximise both the coherence of attributes within dimensions and the difference between dimensions.
The nine dimensions (Figure 1) have much in common with those recently identified in similar ‘ground-up’ studies[2] from other parts of the world but with subtle differences. While lack of money or money-like resources was crucial to respondents’ understanding of poverty, it was most often discussed in terms of the resultant physical and emotion suffering associated with harsh working and living conditions. For many respondents, especially migrants in the provincial capital in search of employment, a dominant manifestation of poverty was the precarious, physically demanding nature of work that appeared unending, and which offered limited autonomy and even less intrinsic satisfaction. Indeed, exploitative treatment by employers mapped onto a dimension reminiscent of the institutional maltreatment experienced by people in other countries in their dealing with welfare agencies.
While there was critique of welfare within the Chinese groups, it was muted. This may have been because urban welfare services are largely unavailable to migrant workers of rural origin (hukou); migrants had to keep well and to keep working simply in order to survive. What people in poverty in other countries describe as disempowerment, the groups in Guizhou termed powerlessness. This might simply be a linguistic point, but it could reflect institutional differences: the lack of individual rights in China and public belief in a benevolent state acting only when it can.
While the poverty described in Guizhou had specifically Chinese characteristics, the core experience of emotional suffering and struggle exacerbated by social abuse and exclusion was largely as reported elsewhere. The suffering was made worse by belief that others held them in contempt (a judgment supported by views expressed in the one middle income group); and by the firm knowledge that those who would help them often had no money, while those that could help, even close relatives, generally would not do so.
To develop indicators for nine emergent dimensions, a 74-item questionnaire was individually administered in the final two groups and then discussed. Scales subsequently created mostly proved to be internally consistent, distinguished between the 16 respondents in the two income groups, but failed the test of uni-dimensionality.
The survey items were therefore regrouped in a post hoc exercise through which internally consistent, discriminatory and uni-dimensional scales were satisfactorily defined inductively for five of the nine dimensions identified during the groupwork (Figure 1). The attempt to capture institutional injustice foundered because, irrespective on income level, people complained about their treatment by public sector agencies, although those with middle incomes seemed more willing to seek redress. The indices of physical suffering unfortunately seemed merely to duplicate the lack of decent work.
Interestingly, despite their disparate nature, all five of the dimensions measured loaded on a single principal component. This hints that poverty may itself be unidimensional but with multiple manifestations. If confirmed, this would suggest that poverty could be ‘measured’ with respect to a single dimension while, to be successful, policy would need to pay close attention to the other dimensions.
[1] The other members of the research team were: YANG, Lichao, BAI, Hefei, WANG, Jielu, and ZHANG, Bingyi (Beijing Normal University); JIANG, Chulin and REN, Xiaodong (Guiyang Normal University); and XIE, Jian; LI, Zixing, LU Yueqin and TIAN, Feiling (Guizhou Education University). REN, Xiaodong did not participate in the merging of dimensions.
[2] Bray, R., de Laat, M., Godinot, X., Ugarte, A. and Walker, R. (2019). The hidden dimensions of poverty. Pierrelaye: International Movement ATD Fourth World.
Robert Walker is an Associate Fellow and Professor Emeritus and Emeritus Fellow of Green Templeton College. He took up a position at Beijing Normal University in October 2018.
He joined the Department as Professor of Social Policy in April 2006 when he also became a Fellow of what is now Green Templeton College. He was formerly Professor of Social Policy at the University Nottingham and before that Professor of Social Policy Research, Loughborough University where he was Director of the Centre for Research in Social Policy. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and was awarded an MBE in 2012 for his services to social policy research. His recent research includes two major international studies. The first, funded by the ESRC and DFID, sought to establish whether 'shame-proofing' anti-poverty programmes, remodelling them to promote human dignity and to reduce stigma, improves their overall effectiveness. The second study, undertaken with ATD Fourth World, was a deeply participative study working with people experiencing poverty in Bangladesh, Bolivia, Tanzania, Britain, France and the USA to the define the dimensions of poverty that should be considered within the framework of the Sustainable Development Goals. In addition, he is undertaking research exploring the representation of poverty in China through the medium of film.