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Looking into the near future, China faces immense demographic challenges. Prolonged subreplacement fertility has created irreversible conditions for rapid aging of the population, and massive migration to cities has left many villages populated by elderly farmers with no adult children to support them. Soaring divorce rates and high levels of residential dislocation have eroded family stability. To a large extent, government policies created to accelerate economic growth inadvertently fostered these demographic challenges, and now the country is facing the negative consequences of interventions that previously spurred double-digit growth. Legacies of Confucian familism initially blunted pressures on families. Filial sons and daughters sent back remittances, parents cared for migrants' children and invested in their children's marriages, and families with four grandparents, two parents, and one child (4+2+1) pooled resources to continuously improve a family's material well-being. But now the demographic challenges have further intensified and the question arises: can the state adopt new policies that will allow the prototypical 4+2+1 families created by the one-child policy to thrive through 2030? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article describes the transformation of social policy in China and the trends of welfare development. In common with most countries in the world, China is facing an increasing demand for welfare. The free-market economic reforms of the last decade have dramatically transformed social policy in China, which is gradually retreating from an egalitarian and collective approach and moving towards a pluralistic and "residual" orientation. In China, welfare development is affected by three interacting factors; historical legacies, socialist ideology and the process of economic modernization. When the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) came to power in 1949, Mao Zedong tried to introduce a socialist system which was partly rooted in traditional Chinese culture and partly reflected influences from the Soviet Union. With high priority given to economic growth, the CCP denounced the "iron rice bowl" system of welfare as an impediment to improvement in work incentives, efficiency and productivity. Under the slogan of "dismantling the iron rice bowl," major welfare reforms were introduced in the 1980s. This article serves to describe the transformation process and delineate the trends of welfare development.

The article reports on the increase in unemployment rate due to the financial crisis in China. It shows that employment for graduates is one of the issues in the crisis, as 6.1 million of young graduates will enter the job market. It cites a report which blamed the ill-adapted higher education system in which one-third of the students fail to get jobs in the sectors they have trained for. Moreover, the difficulties faced by young job-seekers are linked to weaknesses in post-reform China's socio-economic system.