Introduction: Renegotiating Social Risks in The People’s Republic of China and Japan

There have been various attempts to capture the direction of welfare provision in Japan and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as a regionally coherent welfare regime, following on from attempts by the welfare regime literature to categorize nation-states by the characteristics of their welfare provision in the West. However, stark differences between the PRC and Japan as regional neighbours, and even within the regions of each country, pose a challenge to this kind of macro-level theorizing. This special issue seeks to supplement macro perspectives on welfare regimes by exploring a range of welfare policies across both states from an ethnographic, bottom-up perspective, which captures the dynamic nature of welfare and highlights the importance of understanding how local actors request, interpret, and implement risk management strategies. The management of social risks is shown not to have one clear direction determined by, for example, market logic: instead, this special issue highlights the ways in which the burden of risk shifts between family, market, state, and communities unevenly over time, reflecting underlying institutional norms which are always up for negotiation. In doing so, this special issue emphasizes the importance of local, contextualized understandings of welfare, and suggests that the comparative welfare regimes literature should seek the micro-institutional foundations of welfare provision as the basis for comparison.

导言：中华人民共和国与日本的社会风险之反复磋商

关键词： 福利体系； 微观基础；社会风险；社会规范；东亚；日本；中华人民共和国。

追随社会福利研究中根据西方社会福利供给特点对民族国家进行分类的尝试，一直有各种各样的研究试图将中华人民共和国和日本作为一个统一的地区性福利体系来把握其福利供给的方向。然而，中日作为地区性友邻国家之间、以及甚至每个国家内部地区之间的巨大差别，都对这种宏观层面的理论化方式提出了挑战。本期特刊力图通过一种民族志的、自下而上的视角对两国的一系列福利政策进行探讨，来把握社会保障的动态特性，突出对地方行动者如何诉求、诠释以及执行风险管理战略的理解的重要性，以期对福利体系研究的宏观视角加以补充。据此，社会风险的管理显示出并非具有由诸如市场逻辑等所因素决定的某一个清晰的方向；相反，本期特刊凸显出风险的负担以不同的方式在家庭、市场、国家以及社区之间随着时间变化而不均衡地流转， 反映出深层的制度性规范始终处于商榷之中。通过这种方式，本期特刊强调了对福利的理解的本地化以及充分语境化的的重要性，并提出比较社会保障体系研究应该寻求以福利供应的微观制度性基础作为比较的依据。

Translated from English by Li Guo