Welfare System In The Country, Market And Family

"Welfare regimes" has become a popular research topic for years, and works by Gosta Esping-Andersen have won worldwide recognition as the most influential ones in this area. In the 1990's Esping-Andersen used the term of welfare regime for the first time. Taking it as the kernel of his theory, he focused the research on the operation and interaction of the welfare triad of state, market and family, and thus advanced the three ideal types of welfare regimes: liberal regime, conservative regime and social democratic regime. Nowadays welfare regimes and their ideal types have been generally accepted as the fundamental theoretical instruments in the social welfare studies.This paper is an attempt to examine Esping-Andersen's welfare regime theory in the context of Chinese society. Through the empirical research of the child health care in China, the paper investigates how state, market and family are playing their roles in welfare provision and also makes a comparison with those discoveries of related studies abroad. In contrast to the studies of same kind in China which, for the most part, lack the integration of theory with practice, the paper can be taken as a pioneering work.Chapter 1 is an introductory section. It puts emphasis on the exposition of theoretical framework as well as analysis perspectives and tactics in the paper. Besides, it also deals with the introduction of some theoretical and realistic background information as well as a review of some related studies in China.The next three chapters take two steps to complete the mission of demonstration of how the welfare triad works in the child health care in China. First, Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 expound on all the child health care systems in the power of state, market and family respectively. Such institutional analysis have shown that state, market and family are all playing the part of welfare producer and provider and the child health care is currently a mixture of public and private welfare in wide variety. Second, Chapter 4 centres on the realistic level, which means that its focus is on discovering the real performance of the welfare triad by the interpretation of the questionnaire data. As a result, the qualitative data analysis not only confirms the validity of the findings in the previous part, but also presents the condition how state, market and family distinguish from one another in the strength of welfare provision.Based on all these evidence, Chapter 5 reaches the final conclusion that the status quo of the child health care in China reflects a mixed welfare regime which blends the vital attributes of liberal and conservative welfare regimes and meanwhile shows relatively more similarities with the liberal one. In other words, market and family solutions are promoted in the child health care in China, while public policy is rather residual: state only works where market and family have both failed. The paper ends with some comments on the future of the child health care in China.