Abstract: Joe C. B. Leung and Yuebin Xu, China's Social Welfare, Cambridge, UK, Malden, MA, Polity Press, 2015, 224 pp.Written by Joe C. B. Leung and Yuebin Xu, China's Social Welfare: The Third Turning Point is a book that, within the space of some 200 pages, manages to describe the structure of China's major institutional developments in examining them from a historical perspective, as well as within the country's economic, demographic, legal, and social contexts.China's new social welfare system covers the social protection system and its eligibility (social security benefits and pensions) as well as social services, and their accessibility in both financial and geographical terms. However, it also calls into question the notion of an egalitarian society and the level of economic development required to provide such wellbeing (xiaokang). This term is often associated with terms such as wellbeing, social development, and social policy. According to the definition coined by Elizabeth Segal in 2010 (Social Welfare Policy and Social Programs: AValue Perspective, Belmont, Brooks/Cole), then echoed by the authors: a wider perspective, it is the collective response to social problems.The first publications to tackle the issue of social welfare began to appear throughout the 1980s. One of these was Dixon's Chinese Social Welfare System, 1949-1979, published in 1981 and among the first to provide data on the Maoist era. Other publications would follow throughout the 1990s, such as Cecilia Chan and Nelson Chow's More Welfare after Economic Reform? Welfare Developments in the People's Republic of China (1992), in which the authors analyse developments in wellbeing from both a historical and a theoretical perspective, and Joe Leung and Richard Naan's Authority and Benevolence: Social Welfare in China (1995), which brings to light the disruptive effects that the transition from socialist to market economy had on the social system.The present publication examines the development of the Chinese social welfare system since 1949, a development that in recent decades has been defined by both economic factors (such as the marked proliferation and widening of inequality) and demographic factors (the one-child policy and ageing population). It raises three challenging issues that China is currently faced with. The first is the decentralisation of the economic decision-making powers that were established during the process of reform: the central state makes plans and plots out a course of action, while the provinces put the plans into practice as far as their budget will allow. The second challenge is linked to what was until very recently a period of incredible growth for China; growth, which in fact masks extreme wealth inequality between regions, as well as between rural and urban areas: factors that could lead to social instability. One of the central state's avowed goals is to spread economic growth into areas that have thus far benefited relatively little. The third challenge is the segmentation of Chinese society according to income, which means, among other things, that when it comes to social goods and services, offers via the market must coexist with regulated offers, and their respective levels of quality can vary enormously. Without a certain amount of wealth redistribution, it is likely that society would be forced to divide further still.The book is divided into eight chapters. The first is an introductory chapter that presents an overview of changing expectations in terms of social welfare, and puts the subsequent chapters into perspective. In this chapter, the authors propose the terminology of the Confucian welfare state: one built on Confucian values that promote social stability, order as opposed to conflict, collective interests as opposed to individualism, obedience to authority, family obligations, the work ethic, and the importance of education. The second chapter offers a historical overview of the major economic and demographic indicators, and makes the point that the notion of social stability played a central role in the decision-making behind the successive reforms made to the social protection system. …
Publication Year: 2016
Publication Date: 2016-09-01
Language: en
Type: preprint
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