Attitude, Action And Structure:the Evolutionary Logic Of Welfare China

The design and scope of welfare regimes shape and decide the legitimacy themselves, and it is a crisis if there is lack of agreement. However, it is the leading motive for welfare attitudes to research the legitimacy crisis. It is fair if welfare regimes are agreed to in an initial situation. Referring to social welfare, we can measure the agreement by welfare attitudes. It is a predisposition to respond in a favorable or unfavorable manner with respect to the state of well-being and welfare system; it is a given research object, and an axis running through the whole text. It is a crisis for critique to "closed-door conferences" and the content of the policy agenda about "delay retirement" in 2013. To relieve the crisis, welfare regimes should be based the typical logic of generation which is from attitude to action to structure, and we expect political calculation as a basis to form policy choices.The paper starts at human basic need, explores these factors which influence welfare attitudes from structure context at the macro-level and initial resource at the micro-level, answers the central issue that what type of welfare attitude is helpful for the formation of legitimacy of welfare regime, and outlines the evolutionary logic of welfare regime. It applies CiteSpace III to achieve the transition of the technology of literature review from text description to visualization, summaries the dual perspectives of welfare attitude research:regime and culture, and clarifies the analytical dimensions of welfare attitude; I carry out the research with the panoramic approach, type method and comparison method, following the idea of evidence-based research, and manifest the characteristics of "look forward" and "value-related" in social policy study.The human basic need is a start point of social policy design, including health and autonomy. It is a key to understand welfare regime, and is a value base of social resource allocation and welfare regime operation. The labor can meet the human need, but when the resources are transformed into properties, the people have to work, the uncertainty of which is the root of trouble in the modern society. Based on it, the people have to take action to defend their general conditions as human being. When researching the five approaches-value, resource, right, need and capability, as the basic conditions of human being, I take the human need theory as the criteria of actions, and then observe Chinese real situation in general. The finding is that there is a wide gap in ideal and practical situation to meet human basic need. The actors’ welfare attitudes don’t generate under the condition that the human basic need has not been satisfied. It is an inducement to result in the difference in attitudes, and is also a logic start of welfare attitudes generated. So, the research pays more attention not to the legitimacy of welfare regimes, not to the matching between welfare attitudes and welfare regimes, and but to the core issue that it is what conditions under which the actors’welfare attitudes will be helpful to the generation of the legitimacy of welfare regimes.The crisis of identity is the nature of the crisis of legitimacy, which roots in the difference of satisfaction on human basic need, and results in the impossibility of agreement. The actors’ welfare attitudes under the conditions that have met human basic need are helpful to the generation of the legitimacy of welfare regimes; however, current welfare attitudes may be the product that is structured in advance by existing institutions and cultures. The research finds the logic of industrialism in western welfare regimes to create conditions for capital accumulation and the social legitimation of this mode of production drives China to expand welfare regimes in the same way, and these perspectives of actors-centered, such as class, employer, female and so on is weak to interpret it; in western society the evolution of welfare regimes follows the logic from benevolence and justice to citizenship, and in China it follows the logic of societal stability within state-centered; western society is submerged in the civil culture over a long period of time, but China is in the subject culture. These are typical characteristic of East Asian welfare regime; on the nature, it tries to maintain the legitimacy of state vs. society. As far as the relationship between state and society is concerned, civil society is beginning to sprout up in China, state capacity far exceeds the society, and the degree of civil participation is in the lower rundle; As far as the relationship between civil culture and welfare culture is concerned, civil culture is far short of maturity, and welfare culture as practice is often degraded into a tool which legalizes social policies manipulated by elites when it is lack of fertile soil. In other words, existing institutions and cultures cannot guarantee to meet human basic need.Welfare attitude is not only regulated by institutions and cultures, but also influenced by actors’citizenship. Citizenship is an initial resource, and a system to pursuit equality, including civil citizenship, political citizenship and social citizenship; it is a pre-condition to meet need, and is also a need. However, it is so embarrassed because the system for equality in fact is producing inequalities. Work and family are seen as the best welfare, but in fact, the initial resource social actor has before he entering the market is not equal. There are differences among social actors’ citizenships, the level of basic political and economic qualification is not balanced in socio-demography characteristic, and it is not avoid for market and family to be out of order. If the system which pursuits an equality is not equal, and its outcome is hard to be equality.In theory the gap between the ideal and actual practice generates a social momentum that begins to narrow the gap due to the powerful moral appeal of social citizenship on the basis of egalitarian principles, and it provides a guarantee to the transition from ’the personal troubles of milieu’ to’the public issues of social structure’. But in the contemporary era, welfare attitudes of the public in China have been masked by institutions and cultures, and these rights constituting citizenship can’t be ensured effectively. As an approach to meeting need, welfare is usually seen as goods, gifts, technology, or resources which can be given or deprived at any time, not rights. Only if our view shifts from resource-based view to right-based view, the autonomy of actions will be ensured, and the transition will be realized from’the personal troubles of milieu’to’the public issues of social structure’.In the veil of ignorance, the accidents of natural endowment and the contingencies of social circumstance of social actors will be nullified to influence welfare attitudes; in fact, manipulated by institutions, cultures and social status, welfare attitudes will be distorted and masked, and thereby be alienated; so it will not ensure the legitimacy of welfare regimes. To ensure its legitimacy, we should ensure the justice of reality which welfare attitudes generate in, not lie in ideal state to pretend not to know the reality. It means that we must meet human basic need, and so then it will demask the mask covering real welfare attitudes. At the same time, it is an inevitable requirement for welfare governance to develop. But it can’t be realize automatically to satisfy human basic need, and it must be ensure by rights. Only if that need is a right is seen as axis of welfare actions, namely welfare right seen as the axis principle actions should follow, welfare regimes will have the legitimacy.We expect the welfare regime in future is the agreement among actors with debate in free when their need is satisfied, but a pragmatic approach is that welfare regime must ensure to meet actors’basic need. Welfare regime design should start from need, insist on the idea of evidence-based practice, and deal properly with the relationship between social policy and science, and root in the principles of social solidarity and citizenship. Need is a logic start, the degree of social solidarity is a key index to evaluate the degree to support a kind of regime, and citizenship is a core of social solidarity. In future, we should set up a welfare community with need-based, citizenship as the principal normative mechanism, and social solidarity as tie. It is the lowest ideal, and also the highest ideal.