The Flexible Welfare State: Legitimation, Local Development, and “Housing for All” in China

• In Event: 2285 - State Strategies of Containment and Consolidation

Abstract

Building upon Esping-Andersen’s The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, the sociological literature on the welfare state focuses on national-level analysis and attends little to within-country heterogeneity. This article bridges this gap by theorizing a type of welfare state marked by a common decoupling of policy and practice and substantial sub-national variation: the flexible welfare state in China. I develop this notion by analyzing how the Chinese central government and the municipal governments of two megacities have endeavored to ameliorate the adverse impact of housing commodification. The central government aims to strengthen its legitimacy by installing a façade of a benevolent welfare state and performing a moral obligation. The flexibility of the Chinese welfare state manifests in two aspects. First, the central government does not fully address the decoupling of national policies and local practices. Instead, it attends more to the form than the substance of the welfare state and adjusts the level and scope of implementation according to its priorities, capacities, and public concerns. The source of such flexibility comes from the multilevel power structure of the state and the bifurcated view on state legitimacy. Second, the central state’s attention to the form instead of the substance allows local governments to develop a local welfare state that aligns with their respective developmental model. Distinct development models lead to different ways of governing industry, population, and space and thus to different patterns of inclusion and exclusion in welfare policy and practice. The findings enrich current typologies of the welfare regime.

Author

• Ya-Wen Lei, Harvard University