Description du projet
De pays socialistes à «usines du monde»
Le bien-être social socialiste peut-il coexister avec l’économie de marché? Le projet WelfareStruggles, financé par l’UE, s’est tourné vers la Chine et le Viêt-nam pour répondre à cette question. Les deux pays se sont transformés pour passer d’économies à planification centrale aux économies de marché actuelles. Ils sont restés sous le monopole politique du parti communiste tout en adoptant un système désormais appelé «socialisme de marché». Cette transformation a pu voir le jour grâce au travail de millions de travailleurs migrants dans les usines des zones rurales. Dans ce contexte, le projet examinera leur bien-être et celui de leur famille. En adoptant une approche ethnographique et en menant une analyse comparative de la politique sociale, il apportera un éclairage sur la politique des soins inhérente à la fourniture de services sociaux en Chine et au Viêt-nam, qui sont aujourd’hui connus comme les usines du monde.
Objectif
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.
Programme(s)
Thème(s)
Régime de financement
ERC-STG - Starting GrantInstitution d’accueil
33615 Bielefeld
Allemagne