"Guilty of Indigence" studies the experiences of the urban poor, focusing on the criminalization of poverty from the final years of the Qing dynasty through the transition to Communist rule in 1949. In early twentieth century, a new approach to social welfare identified poverty as a pathology detrimental to China's aspirations for greatness. Debating how best to combat this new social problem, reformers and intellectuals drew on multiple influences, including Japanese penology, Anglo-American sociology, the foreign administration of China's treaty ports, and traditional forms of poor relief. Through detention and labor, new workhouses and relief homes endeavored to rehabilitate the non-working poor by punishing criminality, reforming indolence, and eradicating the "parasitic" dependence of those who subsisted on charity. These transformations marked significant departures from traditional practices, redefining the relationship between government power, private philanthropy, and the neediest members of society. They would also have lasting influence, for once they came to power in 1949, the Communist Party used similar rationales and methods to address the problem of urban transients and refugees.; For the urban poor, the state's criminalization of homelessness had terrible, even fatal consequences. The study focuses on Beijing and Shanghai, two cities where efforts to clear the streets of vagrants and beggars subjected them to incarceration. Drawing on hundreds of letters written by people living in workhouses, relief homes, and shantytowns, this dissertation examines how the urban poor responded to attempts to rehabilitate them through labor, and how they coped with destitution. Shanghai's protracted battles against shantytowns, spanning nearly three decades, illustrate the tenacity of "straw hut people" as they fought to save their homes. Inmates held in government custody protested their incarceration by sending letters to municipal authorities, describing their life histories and the abuses and deprivations they suffered. In their own words, these remarkable records, many of them newly discovered, reveal the range of problems the urban poor confronted, and their struggles to survive in a time of deep social dislocation.
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