Social Protection in East Asian Chinese Societies

Challenges, Responses and Impacts

Peter Saunders, Alex Jingwei He

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138295988
• eBook ISBN: 9781351585750
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Despite its impressive economic growth, East Asia is facing daunting challenges in mitigating its social problems, including chronic poverty and worsening social inequality. The past decade has seen growing scholarly interest in the development of East Asian social policies not only because of the sheer size of the population and its global impact, but also due to the stark contrast between this region's economic prosperity and the ongoing issue of severe social inequality. This book presents a collection of studies on aspects of social protection in East Asian Chinese societies, including Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Contributions by leading social policy scholars working in and on the region aim to promote scholarly understanding of the pressures facing social protection systems in East Asia, identify existing gaps and emerging social policy issues and review the effectiveness of existing programmes. The evidence presented and insights generated will promote further debate and facilitate meaningful comparative social policy studies in the region and beyond. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Asian Public Policy.

The undeserving poor in China: the institutional logic of the minimum living standard scheme and the hukou system

Kristian Kongshøj

ABSTRACT

In tandem with hukou, the Chinese household registration system, the Minimum Standard of Living Scheme (MSLS) may create an institutional melting pot from which negative perceptions continue to inform Chinese attitudes towards the poor. The theoretical point of departure for this paper connects the concept of deservingness with policy institutions. Based on the ISSP 2009 survey, and an examination of country-level differences in the association between perceptions of the poor on the one hand and perceptions of the unemployed and attitudes towards redistribution on the other, it is argued that the theory finds empirical support. The results stress that hukou reform and more inclusive welfare provision are important for improving social cohesion in China.

Introduction: waging war on poverty in China

The successful struggle against poverty in tandem with rapidly increasing living standards has been widely hailed as one of the great accomplishments of reform-era China. At the international standard of 1.25 USD (PPP), the poverty rate in China dropped from 84% to 10% in 1981–2010 (The Economist 2013). This means that China by itself is responsible for the major share of about 1 billion people who have been moved out of existential poverty worldwide in most recent decades.

The retreat of life-threatening poverty does by no means signify that the war against poverty in general is won. The income gap has increased and become a chasm that is exceedingly difficult to jump across, no matter how hard individual efforts may be. The Gini coefficient seems to have stabilized around 0.47, which is very high, yet not as high as in other major developing economies such as India and Brazil, although uncertainties are connected to these estimates (World Bank 2012, Herd 2013). As income inequality has spiralled upwards, relative poverty threatens to take hostage large segments of the population and exclude them from the possibilities of modern China. World Bank analysts Ravallion and Chen (2007, p. 38) have described the feats of the reform era as the ‘low-lying fruits of efficiency enhancing pro-poor reforms’; for example, by undoing the failures of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution and installing some of the basic working mechanisms of a market economy. Further progress will, to a much larger degree, resemble an uphill battle as it requires active and well-implemented policymaking rather than the elimination of old obstacles. To that end, China has enacted a series of social reforms, particularly in the new millennium. Important steps towards increasing coverage and adequacy of social protection have been taken, yet access to public welfare provision is still marked by old social divides (Chan et al. 2008, Kongshøj 2013, Ngok 2013, Liu and Kongshøj 2014). It is difficult, however, to imagine any truly progressive or ‘harmonious’ development in a context of widespread negative perceptions of the poor. If the poor are perceived to be lazy and undeserving of further protection, policymakers feel little pressure to push for further reform or may not perceive such a need themselves.

This paper will substantiate that negative perceptions about the poor do prevail in China with data from the 2009 module of the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP). More importantly, the paper will also argue that negative perceptions are exacerbated by the institutional influence of both the hukou system (the Chinese household registration system) as well as the setup of the most important income protection scheme for the poor. It is certainly possible to find accounts of quite negative perceptions of especially rural–urban migrants (Jacka 2009, Smart et al. 2013, Wong 2013) as well as MSLS recipients (Hammond 2011, Lei 2012), but most studies are based on a qualitative approach. This paper will substantiate this with quantitative and country-comparative methodology and discuss the link between such perceptions and policy institutions.

A large body of research is engaged in theorizing and investigating how policy institutions influence attitudes (see, for example, Pierson 1993, Rothstein 1998, Mau 2004, Mettler and Soss 2004, Larsen 2006, Svallfors 2007, Campbell 2011, Jordan 2013). In China, the rural and urban Minimum Standard of Living Scheme (MSLS) (dibao,

) naturally comes into focus since it is a minimum income protection scheme, which in terms of both programmatic set-up and implementation arguably presents a textbook example of how anti-poverty schemes may create or exacerbate negative perceptions. Additionally, the hukou system divides the population with a de facto dual citizenship, which at times gives birth to discourses similar to anti-immigrant discourses in other national contexts.

The remainder of the paper is structured as follows: Theoretical approaches to institutional explanations of welfare attitudes are laid out in the opening section with special attention to income benefits. The next section will continue to elaborate how the Chinese MSLS fits with the theory in the preceding section, but the hukou system as another institutional factor behind attitudes will also be included. The penultimate section will elaborate on data and hypotheses. The final section will present results that investigate Chinese attitudes towards benefits for the poor as the dependent variable.

Theory: benefit schemes and deservingness of the poor

The inherent theoretical assumptions in the approach emphasizing feedback from social policy on public attitudes are manifold, but can be broadly linked to ‘new institutionalism’ and the various theoretical schools connected to this. In particular, historical institutionalism has been prominent here, with its emphasis on how policy institutions create feedback effects and shape interests and perceptions of not only key political actors but also the citizenry in general (Jordan 2013). Rothstein (1998) takes his point of departure from basic social norms about fairness and justice, but rather than emphasizing how welfare institutions influence these norms, his account outlines how institutions influence our perceptions of whether these social norms are being upheld. Notable is his theoretical discussion on how selective (very targeted benefit schemes with strict eligibility) welfare policies may create the perception that both substantive and procedural justice as well as the just distribution of burdens is being violated. For instance, strongly targeted welfare benefits continually call into question whether people are really in need due to very strict eligibility criteria, whereas less exclusive and more universal benefits do not. This means that more selective welfare schemes to a higher degree are subject to the question of whether substantive justice is being upheld. These dynamics of perception in selective welfare states would lead to much less popular support for extensive and redistributive policymaking. While focusing mostly on the regime level, Larsen (2006) also further elaborates how the dynamics sketched by Rothstein work at the benefit level by combining this perspective with insights from the literature on ‘deservingness’, as investigated by Van Oorschot (2006, 2000) and others. The concept of deservingness emphasizes that it is a fundamental and universal human trait that we want to help those who truly deserve it. Five deservingness criteria are applied when an individual considers whether he would want to share his hard-earned material resources with another individual, namely: 1) need, or whether recipients are actually in need, 2) control, or whether the personal situation of a recipient is perceived to be a result of a personal choice (for instance, a choice not to work), 3) identity, or whether recipients belong to the same group or perceived collective identity as ourselves, 4) attitude, or whether recipients are grateful and compliant, and finally 5) reciprocity, or whether recipients are perceived to be (or will be) contributing themselves to society in some way. Larsen (2006) combines these deservingness criteria with the theoretical insights offered by Rothstein. The reasoning is that strongly selective or targeted benefits by the very nature of their programmatic design continually call into question who is really needy and who is not. Similarly, selective benefits raise the question of whether recipients are to blame for their situation (the control criteria), draw strong boundaries between those who receive and those who pay (reciprocity), and so on. This institutional logic is reversed in case of more universal benefits. In short, strongly selective benefits inherently call into question the deservingness of recipients and therefore much more easily promote negative perceptions, while the opposite is the case of more universal benefits.

Some studies have offered insights as to how these institutional effects may work at the micro-level. At the individual level, deservingness acts as a heuristic device or a mental shortcut that spontaneously guides opinion formation if an individual or a group of individuals appears to be very deserving. As Petersen et al. (2011) argue, the deservingness heuristic may crowd out the effect of other factors behind opinion formation, such as political values. They show empirically how individual left–right orientation matters little for opinion on individuals who appear very deserving, while political values matter more for attitudes towards individuals whose deservingness is easier to question. Similarly, Hedegaard (2014) finds that proximity to benefit recipients (having recipients within the circle of family or friends or being a recipient yourself) matters little for attitudes towards groups with high deservingness in general, while proximity makes a positive difference for attitudes towards recipients with a lower degree of deservingness. At the same time, the findings corresponded with the pattern that recipients of more universal benefits have higher levels of deservingness.

Linking theory and policy context: how the MSLS and the hukou system may shape perceptions of the Chinese poor

The argument here will be that while the Chinese MSLS is selective just as most social-assistance schemes tend to be, it is selective to a degree that should lead us to expect very negative perceptions in China. The Chinese MSLS was adopted as a national policy in urban China in 1999 and in rural China from 2007 (Guan and Xu 2011, Zhang 2012). In this context, it is very important the MSLS is still not available for people without local hukou, as mentioned in the previous section. This is especially important in urban areas, since it means that the large group of more than 250 million rural–urban migrant workers cannot enter the scheme. Shanghai pioneered the urban MSLS already in 1993. While poverty as such was not a new phenomenon, new urban poverty as a result of being unemployed or laid-off (xiagang,

)¹ following economic restructuring skyrocketed and now constituted a great majority of the urban poor (Lin 2007). In this context, Shanghai and subsequently other cities began setting up local MSLS schemes before nationwide adaption in 1999 (Guan and Xu 2011). The regulations adopted in 1999 did not stipulate a national benefit level or formula, except for reifying that it was a top-up scheme, where recipients are entitled to the difference between personal income and the locally defined minimum income thresholds. Coverage and benefit levels had been extremely low for the existing MSLS schemes, but as the central government stepped in and increased its share of financing from 5% to 54% between 1999 and 2001, the number of recipients of the urban MSLS increased rapidly, increased from four million to just above 20 million, a figure which has since been quite stable (Xu 2007, Gao 2013). From 2005, the State Council also called for local governments to establish rural MSLS schemes before finally adapting it as a national policy in 2007. Once again, the central government stepped in with financing, and coverage ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction – Social protection in East Asian Chinese societies: challenges, responses and impacts
• 1. The undeserving poor in China: the institutional logic of the minimum living standard scheme and the hukou system
• 2. Equity, efficiency and effectiveness: an evaluation study of the urban minimum livelihood guarantee scheme in China
• 3. Can China’s new rural social pension insurance adequately protect the elderly in times of population ageing?
• 4. New intergenerational contracts in the making? – The experience of urban China
• 5. An examination of food insecurity among economically disadvantaged youths in Taiwan
• 6. Child poverty and its impacts on social exclusion in Taiwan
• 7. Understanding social security trends: an expenditure decomposition approach with application to Australia and Hong Kong
• 8. Signposting disadvantage – social exclusion in Hong Kong
• Index