Chinese Social Policy In The Reform Era: Development Of And Its Logic

Since the beginning of new century, social policy has become the focus of public debate. Social policy thus draws more attention in social science study in China, particularly with the rising of discourses such as "Balancing Development", "Pay more attention on equality," "Harmonious society", "Livelihood" etc. How to understand and assess the social policy development process since China's Reform and Opening-up thus become an important research issue. Among various Social Policy theories, the regime analysis tradition provides a theoretical foundation and a specific approach for macro social policy analysis. Given the characteristics of Chinese society and goals of social policy in current stage, a theoretical framework which includes welfare mix and welfare outcomes has been introduced to explore the development of social policy in China.An investigation on the welfare mix found that there was a changing role of the state in the welfare provision in China since the marketilization reform. Except for the State and family, market and the third sectors became new agents of social welfare provision, although both the market and the third sectors have only played limited roles in the welfare mix. At the same time, the welfare function of family has increasingly faced challenge; while the role of the state became significantly important. However, the role of State in welfare area a since Reform and Opening-up was not the same role as it was in the State-Danwei welfare regime during Planned Economy period; the state was much more like an institute supplier and welfare organizer rather than a financer or direct welfare distributor.Changes of welfare mix result in changes of welfare outcome. Social right is one of the two dimensions in the measurement of welfare outcomes. Differed from the pre-reform period, social rights after Reform were based on a series of intervened contractual relationships rather than identities such as registral citizenship or membership of certain Danwei. From 1980s to 2000s, social rights were mainly based on employment contracts, thus associated welfare entitlement with formal employment, resulting in the lack of social rights of majority members in society. Since the new century, social rights in china have improved in following twofold; firstly, citizenship becomes sufficient eligibility for some social policy programs such as elementary education and social assistant program. Secondly, the coverage of social right has been much wider than before since it is contribution now premises individual's welfare entitlement in the policy field such as income maintenance and healthy security. However, the social right Chinese citizens enjoyed are still narrow. On the one hand, welfare benefit based on citizenship is rare and low; on the other hand, social right now largely depends on income level and individual budget constrain. And this either excludes low income group from social welfare system or aggravates the expense of social assistant program.The stratified and mobilized effect of social policy is the second dimension to measure the welfare outcomes. From 1980s to 2000s, the stratified and mobilized effect of social policy can be understood as a kind of de-regulation effect of the state intervention on the social structure; although public sector employees including civil servants, staff of administrative departments and institutions and on-the-job workers of state-owned enterprises still enjoyed priorities on the welfare benefit. Therefore, social policies during this period reflected the stratification between minority well-protected public employees and majority private sector employees, self-employed person and peasants who are olny eligible for bounded welfare benefit. Moreover, the association between welfare entitlement and the household registration system blocked the opportunity of social mobility of rural residents. Since 2000s, new social policy programs have covered different groups of people into a benefit-contribution-matched and stratified welfare system. Consequently social policy tends to strengthen the income stratification. The redistribution effect of china's current social policy system is low. Finally, the social policy development in China since Reform and Open-up demonstrates features as incrementalism, conservatism and a transformed and strengthening role of State in the welfare area. Recent policy innovations continued the organizational function of the state in the welfare governance. An institutionalism perspective shows that those can be explained by China's historical heritage of state intervention and current authoritarian politics.