The Study On The Repressive Effect Urban Minimum Living Standard Security System Has On Its Recipients

Since established on 1997, as a major part of China’s social assistance system, urban minimum living standard security system played an important role in helping poor families, alleviating urban poverty problems, promoting social equity and maintaining social stability. On the one hand, the minimum guarantee standard improved a lot with the economic development and price index rising year by year, besides, the system design has become more perfect. On the other hand, due to deficiency in system design and implementation level as well as external environment change, urban minimum living standard security system also produced some negative effects. Based on field research and in-depth interviews on some minimal guaranteeing recipient families in Shanghai, this paper describes the repressive effect urban minimum living standard security system has on its recipients, including the following aspects:order obedience, identity as poor, self-repression, intergenerational transmission of poverty, social class curing, etc. This paper also digged the mechanisms and processes to produce these repressive effects, and proposed several suggestions to alleviate the repressive effect in accordance with social policy for development (SPD) theory.