Welfare State Building: China in Comparative Perspective.

A growing literature examining the social policy of developing countries has sought to explain the diversity of welfare policies and spending levels. This paper uses China's evolving welfare policies to ask how observations drawn from the Chinese case might contribute to theories of welfare regimes. The paper analyzes the strengths and limitations of five explanatory models for welfare regime formation based on evidence from China. Principal findings are as follows: 1) Fiscal surpluses are a necessary condition for any government to initiate or expand welfare provision to some or all of its citizens, regardless of its regime type. 2) Generic models of welfare provision based on region or on political-economic regime type (e.g., East Asian, transitional, democratic) fail to hold up given the considerable variation across these categories. 3) Globalization does not have uniform effects, but appears to pull social policy in different directions at the domestic level. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]