“The Land Cannot Support Its People” A Field Study of the Poverty Alleviation Resettlement Community in Southwest China

Diplôme Master “The Land Cannot Support Its People” A Field Study of the Poverty Alleviation Resettlement Community in Southwest China eng 2026-06-15 author Huang Yuan 989153 director Cattacin Sandro 0000-0002-7685-2037 27172 Service enseignement, recherche, administratif et technique (SdS) (SCSPS) 55 During 2015–2020, China’s state-led Poverty Alleviation Resettlement (PAR) programme relocated 9.6 million extremely poor rural residents from remote villages to newly built resettlement communities. Existing research has generated important knowledge on policy outcomes, economic effects, livelihood transformation, and social integration, but less attention has been paid to how post-resettlement life is reconfigured in everyday practices within local communities. Informed by Michel de Certeau’s concept of everyday practice, this thesis examines how PAR community life is lived, negotiated, and maintained five years after relocation. Based on forty days of fieldwork in a PAR community in southwest China, this thesis argues that post-resettlement life is not simply the outcome of top-down state planning, but a continuously negotiated and maintained process shaped by grassroots workers’ overloaded labour, gendered arrangements that keep women in the local labour market, and resettlers’ generational life courses and everyday practices. Further, the thesis discusses the simplified success narrative of the PAR programme by highlighting the fragility underlying the community’s current stability, particularly the uncertainty regarding its long-term sustainable development. Dewey 301 SACHA 197 Institut de recherches sociologiques TG 122 Département de sociologie T4 false 7f0bf04b-36d8-4d01-853e-b6cf9f0589cd Sustainable societies and social change c5ef4598-0018-4485-92a8-ada9a1e94b5a Master thesis Public YUAN_Master_Thesis_SACHA_2026_OK.pdf 987377 application/pdf 2007d032a49619d29f813a8e14bc2fd80dc5f9e251668a8f57560e8039354159 openAccess Faculté des sciences de la société / Institut de recherches sociologiques Faculté des sciences de la société / Département de sociologie

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“The Land Cannot Support Its People” A Field Study of the Poverty Alleviation Resettlement Community in Southwest China				2026	19	123

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