h-Jiunn Shi

Towards Inclusive Social Citizenship? Rethinking China's Social Security in the Trend towards Urban–Rural Harmonisation

Urban–rural harmonisation has risen to prominence in recent social security reform in China. This article offers an account of the changing welfare institutions and social citizenship configurations unfolded by this particular policy approach. As social activism gained substantial weight as part of the regional developmental strategies of local governments, harmonisation efforts have led to a boundary shift of social citizenship largely defined by the within–without criterion rather than the urban–rural divide. In places where urban–rural harmonisation takes hold, the pivotal criterion for claiming social benefits is the possession of local resident status, regardless of whether this status is urban or rural. The heterogeneity of regional social security developments resulting from social decentralisation also calls attention to the ‘variable geometry’ of institutional change, i.e. various social policy domains manifest diverse degrees of institutional dynamics towards harmonisation. In this light, urban–rural harmonisation is likely to trigger competitive solidarity in terms of regional competition and emulation in economic development and social provision, leading to regional disparities that will shape the future contours of social policy and social citizenship in China.

The bounded welfare pluralism: public–private partnerships under social management in China

ABSTRACT This article discusses a new public–private partnership promoted by an emerging social management agenda in China. Based on an analysis of recent developments in social policy, the present study suggests that the inherent logic and local practice of social management has crowded out the space for societal sectors despite the proclaimed recognition of their social contribution. The collaboration of public and private entities in welfare provision by social management may end up merely co-opting civic organizations into taking responsibility for meeting welfare targets over which they have scant influence, while providing little support for them to thrive and prosper.

The contesting quest for old-age security: institutional politics in China's pension reforms

The overhaul of the existing pension institutions in China poses a serious governance challenge. This article argues that the ways in which the state responds to social problems are necessarily mediated by the political institutions in favour of continued bargaining between different government bureaucracies. Social policy outcomes are often subject to the contestation of diverse policy ideas and interest conflicts among the actors. Using the example of pension reforms in urban and rural China, we analyse how political institutions facilitate or constrain the diverse policy initiatives by competing bureaucratic ministries, thereby influencing the reform process. The main finding is that the inherent conflicts, compounded by the diversity of policy development at regional level, have considerably precluded coherence in the governance efforts of the central government. The distinct institutional politics revealed by the pension reforms is set to have profound implications for the future development of Chinese social policy.

Social decentralization: exploring the competitive solidarity of regional social protection in China

ABSTRACT This article elaborates on the theoretical issues related to the decentralization of social provision within China’s reform contexts. The major contention is that, due to the specific Chinese style of central–local relations, social decentralization has set in motion a set of complex interactions between central and local governments, and among the regions with regard to economic competition and social integration. Three different but interrelated modes of territorial politics in social protection are discussed. These are (1) social dumping, in which regions compete to attract inward investments or subsidies from above at the expense of distributional objectives; (2) regional protectionism, in which well-off localities tend to erect administrative barriers to prevent “welfare migration” from other regions; and (3) intricate central coordination of local implementation that renders social policy development even more regionalized, with only the least common denominator (i.e. minimum benefit levels set in major social programmes) applicable across the country while supplementary benefits remain variegated across the regions. In all three cases, regional inequality and interregional redistribution have risen to significance in Chinese social politics as enormous regional variation in the provision of public goods and services persists. These developments of social decentralization have important implications for understanding the social governance and future direction of social policy in China.

Shifting dynamics of the welfare politics in Taiwan: from income maintenance to labour protection

Welfare expansion in Taiwan during the 1990s was driven by the democratization that focused on provision of social insurance to the marginalized population groups. Since the late 1990s, however, the dynamics of welfare reform has gradually shifted to tackling new social risks emerging from economic globalization and labour market changes. This article analyzes these structural changes and the relevant institutional features of labour market policies. It shows the intensive engagement of the Taiwanese welfare state with labour protection in the domains of unemployment assistance, employment activation, and collective bargaining. Furthermore, the rise of atypical work has equally caused wide concern regarding its low wage income and insufficient social protection, triggering debates about what policy measures can effectively tackle the problem of working poor. The changing nature of welfare politics in Taiwan requires the scholarship of the East Asian welfare state to rethink, both theoretically and empirically, the adequacy of the ‘developmental’ thesis that is used to characterize social policy development in this region.

The Features of Social Cohesion in Taiwan: A social quality perspective

Furthermore, although 47.3 per cent of those surveyed indicated that they were proud to be Taiwanese, 12.9 per cent were not, whilst the remaining 39.7 per cent expressed a neutral attitude towards the issue. More than half (53.0 per cent) of all respondents were not members of any social groups; amongst those who had joined such groups, the primary choices were sports and leisure groups, which, at 22.7 per cent, far exceeded any membership of mutual help associations or voluntary service organizations. Most respondents were found to hold a neutral attitude towards foreign spouses or foreign workers; however, there was clearly much greater acceptance of the former than the latter. Taiwanese society, as a whole, does not appear to exhibit any strong degree of social cohesion, a finding which clearly calls for greater attention from both the government and social scientists. Our primary aim in the present study, through the adoption of this theoretical framework, is to explore the features of social cohesion in Taiwan based upon in-depth analysis of a social quality survey carried out in 2008. Of the twenty social cohesion indicators developed in Europe, five are available in Taiwan and eight are ”alternatively available”. Of particular interest are the results revealed by the social quality survey relating to subjective opinions shown in this study; in the case of trust, 49.2 per cent of the respondents agreed that ”most people can be trusted”, with universities and religious groups being regarded as more trustworthy than either the Government or the National Assembly. Originally proposed within a European context, considerable collective effort has since been placed into establishing a conceptual and theoretical framework for social quality in a number of Asian countries. The overall concept of social quality is sub-divided into the four domains: socio-economic security; social inclusion; social cohesion; social empowerment, and each provide additional sub-domains and related indicators for empirical assessment. This study aims to specifically explore ”social cohesion”, which describes the processes of creating, defending and demolishing social networks, as well as the social infrastructure underpinning such networks. This study closely examines the four sub-domains constituting social cohesion, comprising of trust, other integrative norms and values, social networks and identity.

Paths to (de)centralization: Changing territorial dynamics of social policy in the People’s Republic of China and the United States

Drawing on the existing welfare state literature, this article offers a comparative analytical framework to account for the territorial dynamics of social policy in the United States and the People’s Republic of China, two countries that are most dissimilar in terms of political regime but that may exhibit similar territorial patterns of social policy fragmentation. A promising way to explore such patterns, we argue, is to analyze how changes in the architecture of major governing institutions affect the territorial dimension of social policy. In the United States, state governments and a territorially-organized federal legislature have increasingly accommodated national political parties. These two parties have turned the politics of social policy into a debate over the boundaries of national or state governance of social policy, resulting in multi-level governance frameworks. In the People’s Republic of China, the partisan dimension is absent, but strong economic pressures on the central bureaucracy have made devolution a functional imperative and have given local governments increasing leverage when bargaining with the center.