On the origins of welfare stigma: Comparing two social assistance schemes in rural China

Wubao

Wubao is not designed as a comprehensive social assistance system but rather to meet the needs of certain kinds of people who live in poverty. The target groups are defined in terms of demographic characteristics which assume the status of identity groups in Chinese cultural politics and serve to exclude from eligibility most people experiencing poverty. The dual nature of Wubao, defining eligibility in terms of the conjunction of economic and identity status, was present from its introduction.

Wubao was a product of both the scale of persistent poverty and the collectivisation of agriculture in rural China stemming from the First Five Year Plan (1953–57). While a social security system was established in cities in 1951, no comparable system was introduced in rural areas creating demands for some basic provision to prevent mass starvation. Land reform transferred ownership from individuals to collectives as a critical phase in the transformation to socialism such that, by 1956, over 96 per cent of ‘peasant households’ belonged to cooperatives (Wong, 1998: 50). The collectives were soon generating the resources necessary to underwrite the basic needs of the most vulnerable allowing the central government to lay the foundations of the Five Guarantees Scheme in the Outline of National Agricultural Development 1956–1967, which decreed that:

Agricultural cooperatives should make suitable arrangement for persons who are widowed or orphaned and without support from family, and guarantee their food, fuel, clothing, education and burial. (National People’s Congress, 1957, item 30)

These five guarantees became a fundamental component of policy in rural China with Wubao established for unsupported widows, widowers, singletons and orphans without the resources to feed themselves. In 2015, the legacy of this original identity-targeting mechanism was still branded on the memory of villagers:

In 1960s, every family in our village was poor, but not everyone could get Wubao … The conditions were so strict that few of people could meet the threshold. Only elders without sons or daughters, or children without parents, or the disabled without any working ability could get the benefit. (Li T.K., villager, over 75 years old)

Wubao was modified several times after the collectivist era during the Reform and Opening-up periods in China but most importantly in 2006 when financial responsibility was transferred from collectives to central and local government (Gao and Huang, 2007). This reform, which facilitated the expansion of the scheme, altered the five guarantees, with fuel being subsumed under the broader category of housing, medical care being added and education being more clearly bracketed as for orphans only. The 2006 Regulations established the following eligibility criteria, the ‘Three Nos’:

Elders, the disabled, and children who meet all the following conditions: first, incapability of work; second, no income; third, no persons statutorily required to provide maintenance. (Ministry of Civil Affairs, 2006)

Village cadres have no discretion in applying these criteria, not least because people meeting them are well known to villagers. Consequently, only 12 people, all widows or widowers, received Wubao in Stone-bridge in 2015, each getting 250 yuan RMB (about £30) per month. Numerous other families were excluded:

Frankly speaking, elders without sons or daughters are pitiful because they cannot work and cannot get any support from other family member, and the only hope for them is the benefit from Wubao. But it is even harder for some families with sons or daughters. For example, one family with three school-age children have had to go into debt to support their children’s education, given the father is disabled. But this family cannot get the benefit [because they have offspring]. (Li Q.H., Leader of Villagers’ Committee)

Dibao

As already noted, Dibao became the dominant social assistance in rural China from 2007. It is jointly funded by central and local government and administered by village committees. Unlike Wubao, Dibao is formally targeted on income rather than identity or demographic group with the legislation making clear its anti-poverty intent:

The aim of rural Dibao is to reach all people who live in poverty in rural China, alleviating poverty in a stable, durable, and efficient way. (State Council, 2007)

In theory, therefore, everyone whose income is below the Dibao threshold has the right to receive benefit irrespective of identity. In 2014, the per capital threshold in Stone-bridge, which is set annually by the county government, was 1,600 yuan RMB per year (£168). However, the county also stipulates the number of awards that can be made and the allocation (200 individuals) was insufficient to meet the actual level of need. Faced with this conundrum, the village committee chose not to pay benefit to all people living in families below the threshold as stipulated, but instead to make one payment to each household deemed to be eligible, thereby maximising the number of families who benefit (Li and Walker, 2016). Each Dibao award was worth 133 yuan per month, about half that of Wubao.

The different characteristics of the two social assistance schemes, summarised in Table 2, were widely recognised in the village. This is important because it directly influenced the types of stigma imposed on recipients.

Dibao and Wubao are different things. Wubao is a policy for special people like widows or widowers, while Dibao is not. Dibao is for everyone who is poor, no matter how you fell into poverty. (Xiao H., villager, female, 55 years old)

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Table 2.

Comparison of Wubao and Dibao.

	Wubao	Dibao
Nature of policy	Social assistance, alleviating poverty	Social assistance, alleviating poverty
Targeting mechanism	Identity targeting	Income targeting
Targeting group	Elders, the disabled, orphans who are poor	Anyone who is poor
Source of funding	From collective-based to public finance supported	Public finance supported
Guarantee standard	Higher	Lower
Coverage	Narrow	Broad

Institutional stigma

While institutional stigma is a product of the framing, structure and delivery of benefit (Walker, 2014), its precise expression reflects the conjunction of policy and culture. Different histories shape the framing of both schemes. Wubao is a product of collectivism dating from a time when local needs were met locally at considerable personal cost. In contrast, Dibao is an example of modernity, an income-based scheme that was introduced when poverty had come to signify personal failure rather than, as in the Maoist era, a sacrifice made for the common good. Moreover, Dibao has been co-opted locally for purposes of social control rather than poverty relief (Li and Walker, 2016). These framings affect the design and implementation of Dibao and Wubao and their social acceptability.

Although Wubao and Dibao both target low incomes, Wubao recipients additionally have to meet the ‘Three Nos’ criteria. These additional conditions mean that, while Wubao targets the ‘poorest of the poor’, it also excludes some of the very poorest. With these restrictive rules, Wubao divides villagers making recipients special and conspicuous for culturally the worst of reasons:

Wubao is a special policy just for those special persons, and we don’t want to be the special ones. (Li J.Y., villager, female, over 65 years old)

Frankly speaking, to be a Wubao household is not what I want. There was no Dibao system in the past, so I had to apply for Wubao. But now, I would like to give up Wubao and apply for Dibao. My request was refused by village cadres; they said that if I quit Wubao for Dibao … other villagers would have less opportunity to receive it. … If I quit the Wubao scheme, I would get less money. But I am still willing to do so because people would stop addressing me as ‘old bachelor’ [which is insulting]. (Qin X.Z., Wubao recipient, over 68 years old)

Because any person meeting the ‘Three Nos’ criteria is likely to be poor, Wubao clearly targets financial need but, understood from the perspective of culture, this threshold has another totally different meaning: having ‘no family support’. In Chinese culture, having no descendant is the worst of the ‘three unfilial acts’, for it means not only failing to give purpose to one’s own life, but preventing the continued existence of one’s family. Although this doctrine has been weakened in modern times, illustrated by the growth in ‘dual income, no kids’ (DINK) families in urban areas (Wang, 2009), the idea of procreation as a basic duty punishable within the extended family remains very influential in rural China. While logically it is not Wubao that causes recipients to have no descendants, having no descendants entitles them Wubao and adds to its stigma. In combination, childlessness and Wubao create a heavily stigmatised cultural identity that acts as a deterrent to applying for benefit, sometimes powerful enough for people to resist overtures from the village committee:

In the past, we didn’t have much collective resource to take care of Wubao recipients, so we just involved a few single elders … But now, expenditures on Wubao are from government, so we would like to expand the coverage and involve some who are disabled. But, when we asked some of them to apply for Wubao, they got to be angry and refused our suggestion rudely. It is very strange, and Li Z.M. is an example. (Xi X.H., major member of Villagers’ Committee, female, nearly 50 years old)

This ‘very strange’ behaviour was explained by Li Z.M. himself when interviewed:

I don’t know whether I can apply for Wubao. Even if I can, I am not willing to do so. Which kind of people are Wubao households? Everyone knows that only those who have no sons and daughters would become Wubao households. Families without descendants will disappear in the future, and that is a dreadful thought to behold. (Li Z.M., disabled, Dibao recipient, about 40 years old)

Dibao is very different. While the regulations circumscribe who may receive benefit defining, for example, ‘family members’ and what counts as family income (e.g. awards under the One Child Policy, medical aid and students’ scholarships are excluded), these criteria relate to socioeconomic status and do not distinguish special groups of people. This distinction was widely recognised:

It is nothing (special to get Dibao). Although some families are rich now, they would fall into poverty if they encountered a problem requiring great expenditure, such as an unexpected serious disease. It is a valuable institution for every peasant. I think we should not consider recipients as a special group because you may need it one day in the future. Of course, benefit is distributed to people who are not poor which is another story. (Xiao H., villager, female, 55 years old)

In sum, Dibao does not carry the same innate stigma as Wubao. However, Xiao H.’s words point to the importance of implementation, which adds further to the distinctiveness of Dibao and Wubao (see below). Both schemes include a review of circumstances that is expected to lead to a turnover of recipients. So, for example, under Wubao, a young person reaching the age of 16 would cease to be eligible as an orphan. However, because in many villages the Wubao scheme is paid only to elders without family support, recipients tend to receive the benefit until they die. While this is clearly appropriate, since without Wubao their financial circumstances might become desperate, the permanence of benefits adds to the divisiveness of Wubao by creating a separate welfare ‘class’ of beneficiaries different from other villagers. Not only are some members of this class stigmatised for their failure to procreate, all are considered to be paupers, people who are incapable of making good and forever reliant on society and others’ charity.

Once you become a Wubao household, you will be a Wubao household forever. The hat of ‘Wubao household’ will be put on your head in all your life, and once the hat is on your head it means that you cannot feed yourself and you are a loser. (Ying S.H., Senior member of Villagers’ Committee)

Dibao, on the other hand, is an annually adjusted programme meaning that recipients will be different every year although in practice longer-term recipients confronting sustained financial insecurity are likely to constitute a growing proportion of the total. Nevertheless, the perception was that Dibao is a temporary benefit tiding people over difficult circumstances that is available to anyone who might encounter hardship (see respondent Xiao H. cited above).

For Dibao recipients themselves, the annual adjustment must lead to some ambivalence: on one hand, there is the risk of losing benefit; on the other hand, the stigma of dependency is reduced, and the chances of social exclusion lessened. This ambivalence is clear in the following quotation:

It is true that some of recipients, including me, cannot get the benefit anymore because of the adjustment. But in my opinion, the adjustment is necessary and reasonable as long as it is implemented accurately. Without adjustment, Dibao system would become like Wubao, and people would look down on Dibao recipients like they do Wubao recipients. (Yu D.M., Dibao recipient, female, over 45 years old)

The proviso in the above quotation that the adjustment should be accurately implemented is revealing because, as is explained in the next section, Dibao is very often not administered per regulations leading to bad targeting (Li and Walker, 2016). While the principle of annual review might be widely supported, mal-administration is not. Equally, because Dibao awards are not infrequently made to reward good behaviour rather than to address need, Dibao can sometimes be seen as a badge of high social standing rather than a mark of personal failure (Li and Walker, 2016). The readjustment increases the incentive for such good behaviour since it annually frees up Dibao resources to be used in this way.

Social stigma

Institutional stigma may be amplified or muted by social norms as expressed in the attitudes and behaviour of the public towards welfare recipients. Individual welfare recipients may be more or less sensitive to social stigma with some internalising the same values and others not. Irrespective of whether social stigma is internalised to be felt personally, the labelling involved creates a generally negative environment that can frame the lives of welfare recipients.

While Wubao has its origins in the collectivist era when mutual support was encouraged and people in poverty were sometimes favoured politically, the historic antipathy towards poverty remains strong; poverty is described as ‘the greatest of evils’ in the Confucian Book of Rites. Therefore, although villagers often looked on Wubao recipients with mixed emotions, the social stigma of poverty was generally added to that attaching to childlessness. The financial circumstances of beneficiaries were self-evidently desperate but equally villagers often felt that there must be some character flaw, some deficit, to cause the destitution experienced by Wubao recipients. Many referred to the paradox inherent in the traditional saying ‘kelian zhiren biyou kehen zhichu’, sometimes translated as ‘there is reason to despise those who could be pitied’:

I know that Wubao households are really pitiful. No one would deny that. But, as we always say, ‘there is reason to despise those who could be pitied’. Take Li Z.T. as an example. He was so lazy when we worked for the cooperative together and he always went gambling and got heavily into debt. I was sure that he would become a Wubao household when he got old. You see, it has come true. In my opinion, he is an irresponsible person not only for himself but also for the society. (Li T.M., villager, about 70 years old)

In the eyes of common villagers, recipients of Wubao were often considered to be ‘losers’, the ‘dregs of society’ and ‘pitiful’, in other words both disgraceful and pathetic. Some parents even used Wubao recipients as negative role models:

I always educate my son that if he does not study hard, he will not get a good job nor get married. So, he will become a Wubao household like Qin X.Z. That would be a disgrace not only for him but also for our whole family. (Jiang J.X., villager, female, about 40 years old)

The stigma against Wubao was so severe that it resulted in social exclusion, causing recipients often to experience great loneliness:

Although I live in the centre of the village and many neighbours live around me, I almost make no contact with them. Even at the Spring Festival, few villagers come to me and say ‘Happy New Year’. One reason maybe that I am so poor and they gain nothing in return from meeting with me. And the other reason would be I am a Wubao household, and they look down upon me. (Li Q.Y., Wubao recipient, over 66 years old)

Li Q.Y.’s reasoning was confirmed by non-recipients:

I don’t mean that Wubao recipients are separate from us because they really need help from us and society, but it is true that we have less interaction with them than with others, although we provide help for them sometimes as neighbours. First, it is not necessary for us to interact with them. Secondly, there are reasons for everyone who becomes a Wubao household and we don’t want those factors influence our family members, especially our children. (Ying Y.H., villager, female, about 35 years old)

In marked contrast, the profound social stigma imposed on Wubao recipients was largely absent with respect to Dibao, despite villagers’ general antipathy towards poverty. Paradoxically this may partly be due to the maladministration of Dibao, which has been commandeered as an instrument of village governance to effect social control and order rather than primarily to mitigate the effects of poverty (Li and Walker, 2016). In Stone-bridge, Dibao was allocated to four kinds of recipient:

It will be evident that only the first group carries the unqualified stigma of poverty; the others exhibit a positive status albeit slightly tarnished by the taint of corruption. Moreover, in a Chinese rural context held together by a network of mutual obligations, corruption is often understood and condoned as a manifestation of guanxi, a traditional form of social currency. Hence, to the extent that receipt of Dibao is evaluated based on ability, personality or behaviour, the outcome is broadly positive, the negative consequences of any poverty being offset by the positive associations of good social behaviour and high guanxi and social influence.

I don't feel something special when I talk to my neighbours even though I benefit from Dibao. If you ask anyone you meet on the road ‘would you like to get Dibao’, the answer would be ‘yes’. Since everyone wants to get the benefit, no one would laugh at the recipients. (Liu X.Q., Dibao recipient, 64 years old)

This is not to say that there was universal approval of Dibao being abused:

How do I evaluate the recipients of Dibao? It depends. Some people should get it, such as the disabled. However, some of recipients should not get it because they are not poor. I know that they get the benefit because they are related to village cadres or previous village cadres. This is wrong, and I have informally told them so. (Wang X.M., villager, about 40 years old)

However, people with such reservations were quite often dismissed as expressing sour grapes. Moreover, the belief that anyone could receive Dibao based on good behaviour or good connections seemed to achieve the social harmony sought by the village cadre. Such complex machinations contribute further to destigmatising Dibao (while helping to explain its poor targeting (Golan et al., 2014; Li and Walker, 2016)). In contrast, the shame of poverty adds to the social stigma of Wubao; so strong is contempt for Wubao that it has no value as a tool of social control to be used by village cadre: nobody wants to be a Wubao household.

Personal stigma

The stigma felt personally by benefit recipients is a complex amalgam. It fuses social and institutional stigmatisation with individuals’ own values and sensibilities that are themselves partly shaped by social norms including stigmatisation. The more that recipients align themselves with the social values, the more stigmatisation is experienced as shame with all the negative consequences documented by others (Tangney and Dearing, 2003; Walker, 2014).

In Stone-bridge, Dibao was generally viewed as a positive good, a community resource often enjoyed by the worthy and influential. Applications for Dibao far exceeded awards, which is explicable in terms of the balance between two kinds of shame: that attached to poverty and that attributable to injustice (Li and Walker, 2017). People, knowingly ineligible, claim Dibao with little sense of shame or guilt because it has become the accepted norm. On the other hand, the stigma associated with poverty has perhaps increased over time with personal financial success now being encouraged by national government while economic failure is despised. This was certainly the perception of the comparatively few people who claimed Dibao out of need. They considered themselves to have failed when measured against their own aspirations and those of their neighbours:

Earning much money is the best indicator of success and if you cannot do that, you will be a loser. I am a loser as I cannot feed myself, but have to wait for assistance from government. (Wang Z., 55 years old, Dibao recipient).

People in poverty who applied for Dibao explained that they had no alternative but to do so despite it making them feel ‘uncomfortable’. Shamed by the confession of poverty and the failure that Dibao represented, they were seldom comforted by the fact that Dibao was received by many people who were much better off than they were; this merely drew attention to their low income and limited guanxi:

Dibao always makes me uncomfortable but I must apply for it every year because I have no choice. You know, I just have one hand now and cannot do any heavy work to earn enough money to feed myself and my daughter. (Hu J., Dibao recipient, 43years old)

As noted earlier, Wubao recipients also experience a deficit of guanxi and the shame of both being poor and needing state welfare. But, additionally, all the recipients interviewed reported belonging to a special group of people defined in negative and derogatory terms. For Wubao recipients, social stigma translated directly into personal stigma that applied not only to their economic circumstances or even their behaviour, but to their sense of self. This is personal stigma experienced as shame.

I don’t like getting Wubao, but I don’t have any other choice! … A lot of people think that I am pathetic, while others think that I deserve it because I did too many wrong things when I was young. I agree that it is my destiny to be a Wubao household … The only thing I wait for is death. (Li Z.T., recipient of Wubao)

To summarise, stigma associated with Wubao is more severe than for Dibao, and cumulative, leading at a personal level to the negation of self; at a social level to exclusion; and at an institutional level to cultural marginalisation (Table 3). In contrast, Dibao is generally viewed as inclusive in that it was potentially available to all; ironically, stigma was experienced only by recipients who were truly eligible for benefit who carried and internalised the stigma attached to being poor.

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Table 3.

Wubao, Dibao and stigma.

Types of stigma	Wubao	Dibao
Institutional	Cultural marginalisation	Cultural inclusion
Social	Social exclusion	No clear social exclusion
Personal	Negation of self	Shame of poverty