Iron rice bowl

Iron rice bowl 铁饭碗 tiě fàn wǎn is a term used to refer to employment with guaranteed job security, as well as steady income and benefits. Harking back nostalgically to back in Mao’s day, when everything was owned by the state, everyone worked for the state, jobs were guaranteed for life, your work unit provided your housing, health care, educated your children, all in the one compound.

The neoliberal reforms of the 1990s initiated by Premier Zhu Rongji explicitly demanded that iron rice bowls be smashed; henceforth productivity mattered. Millions lost jobs in state owned enterprises, in the name of efficiency.

Now the iron rice bowl is coming back, in remote landscapes in China’s far west, in nomad families accustomed to precarity of seasonal unpredictability, but not the modern precarity induced by carrying capacity and stocking rate limits on herd size. Increasing immiserisation of nomads made job security valuable. Cadres and state employees usually still have jobs for life.

Now “each household has one ranger who works on the grasslands at the Sanjiangyuan Nature Reserve”.  Iron rice bowl is back, and on the rangelands initially welcome as insurance against poverty. However, a core responsibility of these newly recruited rangers from Tibetan nomadic families is to enforce regulations mandating relocations of herder families away from their ancestral pastures. No longer are the relocation quotas implemented by cadres who don’t even speak your language, now they could be enforced by your own son.