Minjian: the Rise of China’s Grassroots Intellectuals

Abstract

politics and radical welfare reforms were highly unusual, the problems that challenged Chinese welfare reformers were not. The difficulties posed by the high cost of expanding social insurance coverage is a poor economy were faced by almost all developing countries in the postwar period. Scarcity provides a simpler explanation of the changing dynamics of Chinese welfare politics in the 1950s than either level or the nature of income inequality. It might also serve to reconcile the contradictory findings about class segmentation and welfare coalitions in Western Europe and Latin America. With the national social assistance program and broad welfare coverage in health care and pension programs, the new Chinese welfare state can be expected to reduce poverty, especially in the countryside. But unless there are major policy changes, the Chinese welfare state will not be as progressive as the European welfare states or even the American welfare state. Nara Dillon used new materials to build up a solid analytical foundation for his case study of the radical inequalities: China’s Revolutionary Welfare State in Comparative Perspective. He correctly pointed out that many factors caused the inequalities after the Communist took control over mainland China under a universal coverage welfare goals and policies, but the most obvious and important was the poor economic conditions. He chose the gap between urban residents between the state owned employees and the collective entity employees over their workplace welfare; the narrow coverage among the urban residents and the residents in rural areas. He compared these inequalities in China with those in other developing countries and showed that they all reflected certain level of similarity in nature. Nara Dillon reached his conclusion that the institutional build up of the welfare state in China cannot be comparable to that of the Europe and the United States under current design and model. He noticed the great efforts in China to improve the welfare state would surely reduce poverty level in both the urban area and countryside, but he did not mention how China could catch up with the European or the American standard. The major policy changes he touched that would be progressive as compared to Europe and the United States lacked the persuasive evidences, especially when the global crisis such as Covid-19 breakout occurred.