Scale as Achievement: Levels of Organization and Measurements

“Scale” can refer to size, number or level. For this paper, two meanings of scale are relevant. In social science, “scale₁” is frequently about levels of organization (micro, meso and macro; local, regional, national and global; individual, family, community, state and international organizations). In care-related policy design, needs and responsibilities as well as units of delivery and receipt are often ascribed to these different scales. In the justifications of dibao standardization, for example, “the family” (or “the household”) and “the state” have been highlighted as care-relevant scales in the first sense.

Besides levels of organization, “scale₂” is also used in social science and policy design to refer to measured qualities and quantities. Families, communities and states have been measured to be smaller or bigger in terms of members, territory and wealth; connections between and within these levels of organization have been evaluated to be closer or more distant, weaker or stronger; care on different levels has been assessed as better or worse, in terms of frequency and intensity, or more fundamentally, as present or absent. The calculations of family care through the percentages of state assistance recipients in different countries found in justifications of standardizing dibao and the database of state assistance recipients considered to be close relatives of state officials concern scale in this second sense.

Anthropology and sociology once developed many bipolar concepts implying differences in scale and mapped them onto societies that were characterized as either small (and simple) or large (and complex). This often also implied a temporality of progress from the former to the latter,Footnote ¹¹ contributing to the scalar imaginary of the modernization narrative. In very broad strokes, the story goes like this: With the decline of kinship, families became ever smaller and lost their political and economic function. As people became increasingly individualized, societies grew larger and small face-to-face communities were incorporated into large states where members of the nation no longer knew each other personally. These scalar imaginaries, in particular the split between state and kinship,Footnote ¹² also informed how care was studied. Anthropological kinship studies and family sociology focused on child-rearing, elderly care and housework within families and households, while political science, political sociology and political anthropology focused on social policy. In studies of social policy, the scale-based split has been maintained through a further distinction in policies that provide either “direct” care through services or “indirect” care through money.Footnote ¹³ Modernist imaginaries of scale have thus led to family care and state care becoming specialized topics of different disciplines and subfields.

In the meantime, anthropology has largely abandoned scale-based, dichotomous concepts. Some have even characterized anthropology as “scale blind” and criticized anthropologists for ignoring the size of the societies they are studying and the “horizons of concern” of the members of these societies.Footnote ¹⁴ Those who have recently taken a scalar turn do not assume that scale is a given.Footnote ¹⁵ James Ferguson and Akhil Gupta, for example, have argued that “state spatialization” emerges through bureaucratic practices. Images of the state as standing “above” society and as “encompassing” its localities are consequential and have helped to naturalize and legitimize state authority over society.Footnote ¹⁶ Therefore, such authors no longer ask questions about the consequences of scale (e.g. how the scale of organization affects care),Footnote ¹⁷ but inquire into actors’ scale-making projects.Footnote ¹⁸ At the same time, studies of care have begun to think outside of the boxes of kinship and politics,Footnote ¹⁹ instead turning their attention to the connections between family and state.Footnote ²⁰

China studies has long been concerned with links between family governance and state governance, not least because of Confucian ethics.Footnote ²¹ Both culturalist and statist versions of studies that linked social policy to Chinese kinship have presented care as a zero-sum game between the scales of state and family.Footnote ²² Moving beyond analysis of negotiations of needs and responsibilities between actors at – and care practices on – seemingly discrete scales of organization, I use the notion of boundary work to show that care produces scale₁. What people enact as state or non-state (e.g. family, civil society, economy) emerges in practices, as do the scalar versions of state spatializationFootnote ²³ – the state “above” society and the state as “encompassing” its localities – that thrive on performed state boundaries.Footnote ²⁴

Rather than starting from predefined levels of organization and denying the status of “care” to certain practices a priori, it is more productive analytically to start from an open perspective that potentially includes every kind of human activity as care. Such a perspective acknowledges that “all humans have needs that others must help them meet,”Footnote ²⁵ and that both their specific needs and the particular ways in which others address them vary. Whether or not certain practices are interpreted as care, such as providing money through wage labourFootnote ²⁶ or arranging cash-based state benefits, is not merely an academic question, but part and parcel of the attention and action of care through which scale₁ (understood as level of organization) is enacted. In the process, the scale₂ (understood as quality and quantity) of care is changing: intensifying or decreasing, distributing resources to more or less people identified as needy, assigning responsibility to more or less people with more or less resources. Moreover, sometimes the scale₂ of care itself becomes a marker for performing the boundary between state and family,Footnote ²⁷ or an indicator for measuring kinship and determining thresholds of belonging on different scales₁.Footnote ²⁸

The following analysis is based on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2013 and 2015 in rural China, mainly in Daxi, a village of about 1,500 registered inhabitants in Qiuling township in Sichuan province. This township is located in the hills just outside the provincial capital Chengdu; a construction boom in the nearby county-level city (about 100,000 inhabitants) offered migrant workers alternative employment opportunities much closer to their home village and people in the township regard Daxi as neither particularly rich nor particularly poor. I had initially settled in this self-styled “ecological” village because I was interested in how actors performed the boundary between state and civil society in a place whose peasant cooperative was supported by both officials and non-governmental organizations (NGOs).Footnote ²⁹ The unexpected cancellation of all existing dibao allowances and the reapplication process in April 2015 later attracted my attention. I attended the democratic appraisal meeting in the village, interviewed township and village officials, dibao applicants and other villagers about the topic and researched statistical data on dibao and other state benefits in Yinhe city; but my analysis and interpretation also build on some of my earlier observations (e.g. of communal labour) and conversations (e.g. about state benefits) that suddenly became relevant.

Below, I explore dynamics of care and scale by examining how officials and citizens negotiated access to dibao, interpreted dibao-related practices as “individualistic” or “filial,” and practised welfare and workfare before and after standardization. In these processes, actors mobilized imaginaries of scale, grouped care receivers and caregivers in smaller or larger units through negotiations of needs and responsibilities, and thus shaped the distribution of resources and, hence, of inequality. Taken together, the standardization of state assistance in Daxi shows that different levels of organization (scale₁) are not stable grounds of particular sizes and qualities (scale₂) that enable or limit care. Rather, scale (in both meanings) ultimately emerges in China, as elsewhere, in negotiations, practices and evaluations of care. In this sense, care scales.

Is Care a Zero-sum Game between the Scales of Family and State?

Based on assumptions about clearly bounded levels of organization, both culturalist and statist approaches have explored the link between care and scale in China. In particular, they have developed contrasting arguments about how “traditional familism” and state policy shape each other. Taken together, they have demonstrated that care arrangements on one level of organization cannot be understood without taking care on another scale into account.

The culturalist assertion is that a persistent “traditional culture” specific to China (and other East Asian countries) determines the state's welfare regime. This perspective builds on the already mentioned modernization narrative and the presumption that there is a decisive cultural difference between the West and East Asia. In the West, the modern state is said to have developed comprehensive welfare as a substitute for the loss of family care following the decline of kinship. In contrast, in supposedly “Confucian” East Asia familism remained strong despite Westernization and modernization in other aspects of life. Therefore, no country in East Asia had comprehensive social welfare. Rather, traditional Chinese familism was “the sacred cow eagerly milked by an economizing state.”Footnote ³⁰

The statist argument turns the culturalist assertion on its head. Studies of Chinese kinship place recent developments in the family on a broad spectrum between the demise and the persistence of familism and filial piety.Footnote ³¹ Due to a tendency in kinship studies to neglect state care and concrete bureaucratic practices on the ground, if the state enters the picture at all it is often only as a unitary actor that intervenes from the outside with clear “intentions.”Footnote ³² “The state has withdrawn from its previous commitments to providing social services of various kinds,…meaning that the family has taken on many new obligations.”Footnote ³³ Instead of being the “traditional” host of a “parasitic state,” familism now appears as the very product of state (in)action.Footnote ³⁴ It is no longer culture that shapes the state, but the state that shapes culture.

Despite these opposite interpretations, both approaches perceive the dynamics between care at different scales as a zero-sum game. Either existing family care enables the state to reduce social spending, or limited state welfare makes more family care necessary. This kind of zero-sum thinking is also present in one of the above-mentioned justifications of dibao standardization: the complaint about “not enough” family care. Reviving “traditional familism” would allow the state to reduce expenditures on dibao while the cancellation of dibao would push citizens to assume care responsibilities within their families.

Traditional familism in combination with zero-sum thinking was, however, not invoked solely to reduce citizens’ dibao claims. Some citizens in Daxi who defended their entitlements also tapped into this discourse, imagining family care and state care as mutually exclusive. When reapplying for dibao, they emphasized their own neediness through the negative consequences poverty had for their families. At the so-called “democratic appraisal” (minzhu pingyi 民主评议) meeting,Footnote ³⁵ the village Party secretary selected the 77-year-old Li Jiazheng as the first applicant to present his household's circumstances to the audience.Footnote ³⁶ He made an uncertain impression, stammering when he started to talk. The first thing he thought of that he apparently considered powerful support for his dibao claim was his son's lack of a family: “Our household is in difficulty. My son is already more than 30 years old but is not yet married. He also has no prospects, because the family is poor.” However, the village Party secretary corrected him by asking for another statement about the family's neediness. Nevertheless, this notion of poverty appeared firmly established. Despite the village officials’ efforts to “teach” applicants how to properly represent themselves as needy, others repeated the same claim.

This claim-making turned the central government's discourse on traditional familism on its head. Rather than emphasizing the citizens’ obligation to care for their existing family, these villagers’ argument implied that the absence of a family obligated the state to care for citizens. The association between “poverty” and “lacking a family” was well known to villagers in Daxi. In the 1950s, the Chinese state established the “five guarantees” (wubao 五保) programme that promised food, clothing, housing, medical care, education and burial expenses to persons who not only lacked income but lacked family (the widowed, orphaned or without children). Likewise, dibao applicants expected that the state had a duty to step in to compensate for the absence of a family. However, in their claims of neediness, poverty did not result from but caused a lack of family care. Rather than as lacking a family to care for them, they presented themselves as too poor to meet their family obligation to care for their adult children by supporting them with material wealth to succeed on the marriage market.Footnote ³⁷ Poverty caused these adult children's inability to find a spouse and establish a family. Only later would this, in turn, negatively affect dibao applicants’ access to family care. Although the claim to state care was thus justified through the absence of family care, it also implied the hope that state care in the present might enable family care in the future.

This idea that care on one scale might amplify care on another scale thus abandons zero-sum thinking. The idea of amplifying care on different scales can be found in ethnographic studies of dibao. Sociologist He Xuefeng 贺雪峰 and his colleagues studying rural governance regard rural society as the “soil” (turang 土壤) for dibao policy.Footnote ³⁸ Their research shows that the boundaries between different scales are blurred. Village cadres may turn dibao from a form of state care into a form of care for relatives who may in turn offer political support. Other villagers may criticize these same practices as “corruption,”Footnote ³⁹ very much in line with the discourse about “too much” family care in “social connection allowances.” More family care appears to enable more state care (at least for some citizens) unless it is proscribed as “corrupt” – or as “individualistic,” as in the following story of a young man being educated by a state official to become a “filial grandson.”

Scaling through Boundary Work: Kinship Measurements and Evaluations of Care

As Hans Steinmüller points out in the introduction to this special section, care always requires recognition by an audience. At the same time that caregivers, care receivers and their actions are recognized and acknowledged as care (or not), their belonging is established at different scales of organization.Footnote ⁴⁰

Rather than viewing care as an outcome grounded in certain relations, Tatjana Thelen has suggested studying how care practices “create, maintain and dissolve significant relations.”Footnote ⁴¹ In the case of a home care project for the elderly in Serbia that was supported by Norwegian agencies, both project designers and care receivers expected “good” care to occur within supposedly “close” and “warm” relations of family life. When this image of “good” family care was mixed with negative state images, care practices that surpassed citizens’ expectations resulted in a redrawn boundary between state and family. Good home care offered by social workers on the state's payroll did not change citizens’ images of an “absent,” “distant” or “uncaring” state. Rather, care receivers changed the categories through which they related to care workers, treating them not as state actors but as family members (e.g. a “caring daughter”) with certain rights and obligations.Footnote ⁴² Based on images of the “proper” scale of care, evaluations of care practices became effective as boundary work, shaping what citizens consider to be inside and what outside of the state. Care thus became a marker of state boundaries, contributing to the production of scale₁.Footnote ⁴³ Such scaling through boundary work is consequential and feeds back into care practices, as the following story shows.

Duan Shuxi, whose responsibilities as the head of the Qiuling township civil affairs office included the dibao programme in Qiuling township, considered it her mission to “educate” the citizens about the relevant policy regulations in order to improve their “human quality” (suzhi 素质). In an interview in May 2015, shortly after a push for standardization of the programme, she proudly recounted the following story. Once she had gone to a village in the township to explain the policy and immediately noticed a young man in the audience. She wondered what he was doing at the meeting and why he needed dibao. When she asked other villagers about him, she learned that he was there on behalf of his grandfather, who had received dibao up to that time. She therefore decided that during the meeting she would explain the policy that young people had a “care responsibility” (shanyang yiwu 赡养义务) for the elderly in their families. She said that the elderly could not receive dibao if the young were able to contribute monetary support. She complained that many children nowadays did not care about their parents anymore, even if they were well off. She announced that the officials would publish a list of all dibao recipients,Footnote ⁴⁴ emphasizing that it would be especially embarrassing for adult children if their parents’ names appeared on the list. She concluded by telling me that the young man had left even before the meeting ended. She attributed this to his bad conscience and to her having “successfully” educated him. The family did not re-apply for the dibao allowance after the general cancellation was announced at that village's meeting.

While state assistance is usually said to be heavily stigmatized in Western societies, Robert Walker and his team argue that in Chinese society it is poverty, not the receipt of dibao, that is stigmatized. They explain this difference by highlighting that in some places dibao enhances people's mian 面 (status) because it adds to their income and shows that they had the guanxi 关系 (social influence) to get approved. In other places, receiving dibao is not stigmatized, because “dibao has effectively been converted…to a tax-based, universal pension…perceived to be available to everyone.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Dibao has thus been “de-stigmatized by divorcing de facto eligibility from poverty.”Footnote ⁴⁶ However, as Walker and his team also argue, “current attempts to improve its targeting may mean that the stigma associated with poverty spreads to dibao.”Footnote ⁴⁷

Given the push for standardizing dibao administration, stigmatization due to receiving state assistance was becoming an issue of contention in some families and it threatened family solidarities. As the official remarked regarding the young man's presence, it was less usual for the younger generation to attend such meetings than for the older generation to do so. Some adult children in Daxi tried to dissuade elderly parents from reapplying, even if the family was considered to be eligible for state support at the public appraisal meeting. For example, Li Jiazheng had reapplied against the will of his son, who regarded receiving state assistance as shameful. It is thus likely that the young man in the township official's story had been sent by his family – maybe even against his will – because they thought that he would be better able to understand the policy and handle the new bureaucratic procedures to renew his grandfather's application. In trying to retain his grandfather's dibao, he was probably doing just what the township official asked of young people: caring for the elderly by ensuring monetary support for them. However, his actions were not acknowledged as “filial piety” by the township official.Footnote ⁴⁸

In retrospective analysis, what is state and what is family may appear as clear and given. For actors involved in the flow of practice, and from an interactionist perspective, these questions are not settled prior to the question of what counts as care and what does not (see also the introduction to this special section). In the township official's story, her performance of “educating a citizen about policy” located the young man and his actions outside of family life in the public realm of the state. Having thus drawn the boundary, his attempt to defend his grandfather's claim to state assistance was even made to appear against the virtues of traditional familism: as modern, selfish individualism. Such evaluations of practices as either “filial piety” or “individualism” acknowledge (or deny) the presence of both care and kinship in the process, and thus situationally establish boundaries between seemingly given scales of organization and position the concerned actors accordingly.

Having been publicly shamed for caring for his grandfather, the young man ended his act of care and retreated from the meeting. If the township official had acknowledged his practices as “filial piety,” rather than condemning them as “individualism,” his care could have expanded to include monetary redistribution among millions of people. By not acknowledging the young man's attendance at the meeting as a way of attending to his grandfather's needs, she drew the boundary of the family much more narrowly. Conversely, accusations of “corruption” based on claims about officials’ closeness to dibao recipients delegitimized state assistance by expanding the boundary of the family. Measurements of kinship through the indicator of care thus establish boundaries between scales₁ and thereby increase or decrease the scale₂ of care.Footnote ⁴⁹

Scaling through Definitions of Needs: Welfare

The boundaries between state and family were also drawn when needs, and especially units of neediness, were defined to assume or reject care responsibilities. The 2015 push for standardization changed previous dibao practices in Daxi village.Footnote ⁵⁰ A township official commented that some village officials in the township had done things in a chaotic manner. He told me that he had heard that some village committees in Qiuling redistributed dibao from families to those individuals whom they considered to be experiencing difficulties as part of an “internal agreement” within the village. A leader of a villagers’ group in Daxi likewise recounted that it had once been possible for individuals to receive dibao. He explained that it had been possible to “create a dibao household.” If two households each included one person in a difficult situation, the dibao of one household could then be divided between the troubled persons in each household. This was no longer possible, he added. Jin Yongfen, who had served as head of the production brigade and the villagers’ committee in the 1980s, likewise emphasized – after the standardization push – that none of the former recipients in his group had met the conditions formulated by the government. He told me that previously the group leader had filled out the applications and handed them over to the village committee. Rather than giving the dibao to households, he also reported that this group leader applied for the dibao for individuals, and specifically for people in his villagers’ group over 60 or 70 years old.

Li Yongkang, a 70-year-old man with a mutilated hand, had received an individual dibao before standardization. It was cancelled during standardization because he lived in his son's newly built house. When I talked to him in the sparingly furnished main room there, Li confidently argued that the previous handling of the dibao by the village committee was “correct.” He said that he had known that state policy had always targeted “dibao households” and not “dibao individuals” (dibao geren 低保个人). However, the village committee had previously had more power, he explained: then, they only had to report the names of the potential recipients to the township without the officials “going down to the countryside” to investigate the applications.Footnote ⁵¹ The village committee felt that it was irrational if one member had difficulties for the other members of the household to receive the dibao as well. It was irrational to give dibao to those who could work and did so outside of the village, he added. Thus, the village committee redistributed the allowances of household members who were able to work to sick, disabled and frail people living in other households.

Both the State Council and officials in Daxi village thus considered the needy to be those who were old, ill or disabled and therefore lacked the capacity to work. The difference was that the village officials had at first focused on needy individuals instead of viewing households as the proper unit of state care. Dibao policy in in Daxi village prior to standardization did not accept needy individuals being denied state support because other members of their households could work. In this regard, past dibao policy had scaled up care responsibility from families to the state by scaling down the size of the unit of need and dibao receipt from households to individuals. Family boundaries were dissolved, or rather made semi-permeable, as the next section shows.

Scaling through Negotiations of Care Responsibilities: Workfare

Although village officials in Daxi had undone family boundaries when distributing dibao to needy individuals prior to standardization, they reinstated the scale of the family when it came to the workfare side of dibao, when they demanded services for the village in exchange for state assistance.

Sociologists have pointed out that village committees may turn dibao into a “means for governance.”Footnote ⁵² As in other places,Footnote ⁵³ Daxi's officials also pursued their development strategy as an “ecological village” through the dibao policy, particularly through obligations to work. The roads in the village not only had to be kept free of refuse to benefit its own citizens but also to make a good impression on visitors. This “environmental sanitation” was regarded as one way to make the ecological visible to outsiders. The tax reform in the early 2000s had first replaced local fees with a general agricultural tax; later that too was abolished. Villages were faced with serious budget shortfalls and funding refuse collection presented a challenge to village governance in Daxi village.

At this point, the village committee asked some dibao recipients to pick up refuse along the village roads. Li Yongkang and his cousin Li Yongde both received dibao before standardization. As they lived next to the paved road that passed the village, the group leader asked them to pick up the refuse at times when outside visitors were expected. An old man from another villagers’ group, whose photo was posted at the office building of the village committee as an example of a “good Party member,” was asked to pick up the refuse alongside the road and keep the village square clean in exchange for dibao. He was also called on when urban middle-class consumers came to visit the nearby vegetable unit of the peasant cooperative. In a more remote group that was rarely visited by outsiders, the group leader did not ask the elderly for whom he arranged dibao to pick up refuse. A middle-aged deaf man who had until recently also received dibao was the only one asked to keep the road clean. Both central and provincial state dibao regulation emphasized the goal of making poor people with the capacity to actively work themselves out of poverty.Footnote ⁵⁴ In Daxi, workfare was selectively demanded in exchange for the allowance when it was needed to perform tasks necessary in village governance during budget shortages.

Unlike Li Yongkang, some dibao recipients could not carry out the assigned task themselves. His cousin Li Yongde, for example, was blind. Therefore, village officials expected his wife, who did not receive the dibao herself, to clean in his place. The “good Party member” did not receive the dibao himself, either. Village officials had asked him to perform the task on behalf of his wife, to whom they had granted an individual allowance because of leg problems. While Daxi's village committee made family boundaries permeable in order to assemble needy individuals into “dibao households” for the welfare side of dibao, they recreated families as the relevant unit and selectively activated a discourse of familial duty for the workfare side of dibao that served their own village development strategy. The case of dibao welfare and workfare in Daxi village shows that care arrangements do not emerge at separate levels of organization. Rather, care arrangements create and dissolve those levels at different times.

The push for standardization in April 2015 ended this practice of workfare and reshaped the kind of family care demanded in Daxi. Rather than performing communal labour in order to enable family members to receive monetary state assistance in exchange for dibao, families that included former dibao recipients were now expected to themselves care financially for those in need. Standardization thereby removed the village community as an intermediary scale and made the semipermeable boundary of families impermeable.

Scaling through Recognizing Care Outcomes: Caring Family Members as Good Citizens

At the democratic appraisal meeting, citizens tried to justify their reapplications by demonstrating not only neediness, but deservingness. As mentioned above, with regard to dibao standardization central state documents and township officials stressed that adult children had the obligation to support their parents in old age. So long as the adult children were able to do so, their parents had no right to dibao. Tapping into this discourse, applicants highlighted that they themselves had in the past performed their filial duties. When I talked to Li Jiazheng a few days after the meeting, the 77-year-old dibao recipient told me that he was the only one of four siblings who had cared for his elderly parents before their deaths. His older brother and the two younger sisters had left the village and had not returned. By emphasizing that he had been a caring son, he simultaneously claimed to have been a good citizen who had done in the past what the state still expected adult children to do for their ageing parents today. During the democratic appraisal meeting, village officials had rejected such claims to state care based on reciprocity; the now standardized dibao only concerned neediness.Footnote ⁵⁵

Applicants, however, repeated similar claims of deservingness. After listing his household members, the blind Li Yongde, for example, emphasized that he had an “only son.” Using the official terminology, Li Jiazheng also repeated after the meeting that he had fulfilled state policy: “We were among the first who followed the call of the state concerning family planning.” Emphasizing their outstanding contribution, he explained that these days many people only had one child but that he himself had been part of the “first wave.” Li Yongde and Li Jiazheng claimed the dibao as a reciprocal obligation of the state by pointing out how they had cared for the nation by not becoming parents a second time.

Their attempts to scale up the relevance of their past care to the level of the nation could build on scientific research that had also been propagated politically for years. In 1978, Hua Guofeng 华国锋 was the first leader to justify the family planning restrictions based on scientific evidence that demonstrated its benefits not only for maternal and child health, but also national development.Footnote ⁵⁶ While slogans about family planning painted on walls in rural areas in the 1980s and 1990s were at times threatening, slogans since the 2000s have tended to highlight that it enables better care for the only child (e.g. “fewer births, better births” [shaosheng yousheng 少生优生] or “good birth, good upbringing” [yousheng youyu 优生优育]).Footnote ⁵⁷ Having only one child became a form of care for the nation through certain theories (demographic, economic, psychological, pedagogical, etc.) that linked individual citizens’ fertility to the quantity (neo-Malthusian fears of “overpopulation”) and quality of the population and thus predictions about the future development of the country. Scientific research had thus established an image of family planning and childcare as transcending scale and having also positive effects on the fate of the nation. This allowed citizens like Li Yongde and Li Jiazheng to scale the outcome of their past family care up, underlining that they had been not only good parents, but also good citizens who now deserved state assistance.