| In the years after 1949, social rights and entitlements in China have been highly unequally distributed between city and countryside and between workers and peasants. Focusing on the changing rationale, policies, and practice of social welfare in contemporary China, this study shows how the post 1949 Chinese welfare system has reflected and reinforced China's dual socio-economic structure. The persistence of urban-rural inequality was the direct product of Chinese development priorities of the Mao era favoring industry over agriculture, city over countryside, and workers over peasants, and of an institutional structure that sharply differentiated urban from rural people. This dissertation highlights stratifying processes in urban and rural areas, in state, collective, and other sectors, and between workers and veteran cadres. Beginning in 1978, far-reaching welfare reform has proceeded and is moving toward a mixture of centralization and pluralization consonant with the shift in welfare ideology and practice from state socialism to market economy. A new concept of social welfare has been sought to foster which involves rights as well as obligations, with responsibilities shared among the state, the enterprises, and the workers. Despite the progress of welfare reform, China is far from solving problems associated with the lack of state coverage for the great majority of people who live and work in rural areas. Based on the comparative analysis of welfare approaches perfected in the course of China's imperial history and in the Western welfare state, this study concludes that successful welfare reform will require perfecting the combination of roles of government, community, private sector, and family, and the coordination of economic policy, population policy, and welfare policy. |
