Traces of Recovering: Making Recovered Persons through the Compulsory Community Drug Detoxification Program in Urban China

Background/Purpose: As a Western import undergoing processes of “localization,” the profession of social work has been striving to negotiate its presence and legitimacy in existing Party-state-dominant systems of social service/governance in authoritarian China. Through policy schemes such as the Government Purchase of Social Service Posts, frontline social workers employed by nonprofit organizations are positioned in and managed by various state offices, creating an ambivalent institutional space for social workers to enact professionality under the purview of the state. In the anti-drug field, arguably as an integral part of the state’s surveillance system over people with drug use records (PDUR), how do anti-drug social workers participate in making what kinds of “recovered persons” in accordance with the Party-state’s broad agenda of constructing a harmonious drug-free society? This study examines anti-drug social workers in urban China facilitating PDURs’ paths through mandatory drug detoxification/rehabilitation programs. It explores how social workers strategically worked with and round bureaucratic mandates given their ambivalent positionality, as well as the effects of their work on shaping both PDURs-in-recovery and the professionality of “social work with Chinese characteristics.”

Methods: Findings were drawn from an 18-month ethnography (2021-2022) at several anti-drug service sites of a local nonprofit social work organization in the city of Shenzhen, southeastern coastal China. Data collection methods primarily included participant observations (on daily basis, mainly following the work schedule of informants) and semi-structured interviews (60 in total with different types of interviewees such as frontline social workers, PDURs, and organization managers). Non-coding-based interpretative approaches were used to ensure the contextualization of the analysis. The author immersed herself in the data through systematic reading, re-reading, and memo-writing. Analytical themes were identified across sources and were located back into the original data for checking their contextual credibility. The author reflected on her own positionality in the fieldwork process and how it impacted her analysis.

Results: Examining the implementation of the 3-year compulsory community drug detoxification program, the study shows that social workers devoted a significant amount of their time and energy to crafting flawless files for their clients in accordance with various bureaucratic mandates, rather than to actually interacting with these PDURs. Given this intense focus on “making traces,” a PDUR’s recovery status was enacted largely by the on-paper establishment of a desired behavioral pattern of the present, based on which confidence in their future abstinence and approachability beyond the program could be gained. In doing so, social workers simultaneously enacted and undermined the Party-state’s ambitious (but porous) project of legibility. The lack of real-life contacts with PDURs was perceived by anti-drug social workers as an inevitable but pragmatic way to exercise their professional ethics (e.g., respecting clients’ autonomy), since these social workers were aware of their ambivalent institutional positionality as agents of both care and control.

Conclusions/Implications: In China, social work is a profession in-the-making. Findings highlight the importance of social workers’ everyday experiences for examining the emerging ethics, politics, and practicalities of the profession as embedded in China’s sociopolitical environment.