Descripción del proyecto
De países socialistas a «fábricas del mundo»
¿Es posible que el bienestar social socialista coexista satisfactoriamente con la economía de mercado? El proyecto WelfareStruggles, financiado con fondos europeos, se ha fijado en China y Vietnam para responder a esta pregunta. Ambos países pasaron de ser economías de planificación centralizadas a economías de mercado actuales. Mantuvieron el monopolio político del Partido Comunista, al tiempo que adoptaban un sistema que ahora se denomina «socialismo de mercado». La transformación se impulsó con la labor de millones de trabajadores industriales que migraron desde las zonas rurales. En este contexto, el proyecto investigará el bienestar de los trabajadores industriales migrantes y sus familias. Al adoptar un enfoque etnográfico y llevar a cabo un análisis comparativo sociopolítico, el proyecto arrojará luz sobre la política de la asistencia que subyace a la provisión del bienestar en China y Vietnam, ambos países considerados las «fábricas del mundo».
Objetivo
The transformation of China and Vietnam from centrally planned economies into today’s market economies has been fuelled by the labour of millions of migrant factory workers from rural areas. These countries started reforming at the turn of the 1980s, embracing marketisation while remaining under the Communist party’s political monopoly, a system now commonly termed market socialism. In what seems to be a reversal of the wider trends of austerity, there has been rapid expansion of social protection, much like what has been happening in other Global South contexts. While the shifts indicate state and societal responses to the social conflict and tension induced by marketization, they in turn have been foregrounded by the politics around how different groups of people should be cared for, politics that are part of wider moral struggles between actors in the new economy. Given their underclass status and their salience as a social force, the question of the migrant factory workers’ welfare is critical for the understanding of the on-going shifts in these countries’ welfare systems. WelfareStruggles is aimed at uncovering the politics of care underlying the provision of welfare for migrant factory workers in China and Vietnam. It does so through a comparative investigation that has two ground-breaking features: 1) the combination of ethnography with comparative social policy analysis, and 2) a translocal approach that takes into account the workers and their families’ negotiation for welfare across the city and the countryside. The comparison is expected to generate path-breaking knowledge about the variable moral dynamics of market socialist welfare. The knowledge will be essential for understanding the momentous yet little-known transformations of Global South welfare and has wider relevance to policy makers and organisations working with analysing and formulating solutions to the welfare needs of the migrant labour force in Vietnam, China and beyond.
Ámbito científico
Programa(s)
Régimen de financiación
ERC-STG - Starting GrantInstitución de acogida
33615 Bielefeld
Alemania