Welfare for Autocrats
How Social Assistance in China Cares for its Rulers
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Product details:
- Publisher OUP USA
- Date of Publication 24 June 2020
- ISBN 9780190087432
- Binding Paperback
- No. of pages248 pages
- Size 155x231x15 mm
- Weight 363 g
- Language English 0
Categories
Short description:
Over the past two decades, maintaining political order has been the Chinese regime's primary goal. This book shows how China's preoccupation with "stability" (political order) seeps into unrelated policies in previously unexplained ways. This "seepage" has affected China's Dibao program, the world's largest welfare program of its kind. For the first time ever, this book shows how seepage works, what motivates it, what its effects are, and how seepage can backfire, ironically leading to protests and discontent. This book explores the primacy of political order and challenges how we think about welfare, institutional change, repression, surveillance, and collective action.
MoreLong description:
What are the costs of the Chinese regime's fixation on quelling dissent in the name of political order, or "stability?" In Welfare for Autocrats, Jennifer Pan shows that China has reshaped its major social assistance program, Dibao, around this preoccupation, turning an effort to alleviate poverty into a tool of surveillance and repression. This distortion of Dibao damages perceptions of government competence and legitimacy and can trigger unrest among those denied benefits. Pan traces how China's approach to enforcing order transformed at the turn of the 21st century and identifies a phenomenon she calls seepage whereby one policy--in this case, quelling dissent--alters the allocation of resources and goals of unrelated areas of government. Using novel datasets and a variety of methodologies, Welfare for Autocrats challenges the view that concessions and repression are distinct strategies and departs from the assumption that all tools of repression were originally designed as such. Pan reaches the startling conclusion that China's preoccupation with order not only comes at great human cost but in the case of Dibao may well backfire.
Pan has produced an exceptionally researched, brilliantly and imaginatively conceptualized study of the scheme initiated in China in 1999 to placate millions of then lately laid-off members of the proletariat. Using sophisticated computational and statistical work, in addition to exhaustive documentary study and a large range of field interviews, Pan demonstrates that the regime has been using this policy as a form of what she coins 'repressive assistance,' meaning that the government relies on local agents' allocation of benefits and home visits as a means of surveillance. The book flashes with arresting insights and often uncovers new interpretations.
Table of Contents:
Chapter 1: Introduction: The Primacy of Political Order
Chapter 2: Becoming Fixated on Political Order
Chapter 3: Reacting at the Hint of Disorder
Chapter 4: Distributing Social Assistance to Preempt Disorder
Chapter 5: Repressing with Social Assistance
Chapter 6: Triggering Backlash
Chapter 7: Becoming a Digital Dictatorship
Appendices
Supplementary Materials
