Harvard East Asian Monographs, no. 383. Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Asia Center; Harvard University Press [distributor], 2015. 332 pp. (Illustrations.) US$49.95, cloth. ISBN 9780674504318.
Nara Dillon’s fine study of the history of the creation and expansion of China’s urban welfare is ambitious: she covers the initiatives for, influences upon, and pitfalls of providing welfare for the country’s urban workforce from the 1920s into the 1960s, plus observations on the future and international comparisons (among developed and developing countries). Dillon also includes shifts in the handling of “the unemployed” and “social relief” over time. The goal of the study is to understand “the paradox at the heart of the Maoist welfare state”: that the “most important social program for workers did not eliminate inequality; it entrenched it” (1).
The book traces the complexities of China’s convoluted and nonlinear labour history, especially from the 1940s into the early 1960s. It was surely no simple task to weave broad explanatory themes into the huge mass of detail that her clearly exhaustive and painstaking research unearthed. Dillon uncovers new material, such as how international influences—the International Labor Organization, European ideas and Soviet patterns, American aid, the US Congress of Industrial Organizations, and the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration—impacted the early days of labour relief in China; stories of ruralization back to the mid-1950s; the ways KMT factionalism stymied welfare work, but how KMT versus CCP rivalrous mobilization to recruit workers and attain international legitimacy spurred respective drives to expand welfare; and a 1956 draft of widely inclusive regulations put forth by the All China Federation of Trade Unions, which was quietly abandoned with the Great Leap Forward. She also links the major revolutionary campaigns of the 1950s and early 1960s (against “counter-revolutionaries,” the 3 and 5 “antis,” the 100 Flowers, and the Great Leap) with welfare development.
From welfare literature Dillon employs the concepts of “narrow,” “universal,” and “broad” welfare programs to show that China’s program, like that of most less economically developed nations, has overall been narrow, excluding vast segments of the populace. And she notes competition between welfare “insiders” and “outsiders” and the zero-sum distribution between them, and documents trade-offs the regime often faced (or perceived) between welfare and economic development.
The body of the book consists of six chronological chapters that trace, respectively, pre-1949 foreign involvement and models; Nationalist beginnings of a welfare state in the 1940s; the Communists’ own foundations from 1948–1951; the Soviet example during the First Five Year Plan, from 1952–1954; the second half of the 1950s, when restraint followed expansion; and the commune experiment from 1958–1962, which, again, was forced to shift drastically from universalism to a final, unequal project that excluded both the unemployed and the rural majority, constructing a “hierarchy of labor insurance … labor insurance contracts and social relief” that became “China’s permanent urban welfare state “ (261). As to the future, Dillon is both guardedly optimistic but pragmatically ambivalent.
While supplying an impressive collection of explanatory factors for the complex and twisting tale of welfare provision, the work appears reluctant to settle on a parsimonious exposition encompassing the entire body of data. This is definitely understandable. The author has learned so very much in her wide-ranging research that it would seem almost prohibitive to attempt to find an analysis that fits everything presented, especially given the frequent switches of policy under Mao, and the divisions of opinions among his lieutenants (Liu Shaoqi and Zhou Enlai, for instance, did not always agree with Mao on how to treat capitalists, workers, or the unemployed). Sometimes China’s low level of economic development and inadequate amount of resources is the chief explanatory variable. At other times it is the degree and nature of opposition (racketeers in the 1940s, capitalists then and in the early 1950s); factions among policy makers versus one-party discipline; the existence or not of a cross-class coalition (between workers and unemployed); the structure of participation in policy (i.e., the extent of labour’s exclusive role); leadership and state administrative capacity; mobilization and the conditions undergirding it; national unity; rivalry for funds with other programs (social relief, help for the unemployed, the rural poor); legacies (expectations, narrowness, failures that produced caution later); the size of the population and labour surpluses; trade-offs between benefits and coverage; and discontinuities in economic development policy and the size of the harvest all had their roles.
In the end, it appears that it was the “difficulties posed by the high cost of expanding social insurance coverage in a poor economy,” however well-meaning leaders’ intentions, or, simply, “limited resources and a lack of state capacity” (268) that were at the root of a common conundrum in the less developed world. Dillon finds a “further problem” in the preferential incorporation of labour into welfare policy in that world. She attributes this to workers’ struggles to keep their own privileges while sacrificing welfare “outsiders.” But in fact one might read that move instead as regime choice.
Despite the enormous opportunity the book presents for learning new information about China’s early welfare programs, the sympathy I had for the heroic attempt to synthesize so much knowledge into one framework, and my admiration for the enterprise, I admit to having had some problems following the story. Some terms seemed to be used variably (“social insurance”—see pp. 10, 30, 53, 90, 118, 219, 228); the difference between social and labour insurance wasn’t clear; the terms “corporatism” and “labour contract program” lacked definitions; what really happened to excluded groups, especially the unemployed was not told, and, relatedly, there was no reference to the “sanwu” or “three withouts” (dependents, labour ability, source of livelihood) program. More importantly, there is scant mention of the role of political will, choice, and ideology among the leadership as reasons behind policy decisions. Overall, a presentation of welfare’s history that consistently highlighted just two or three factors might have oversimplified the stew but made it a bit easier to digest. Nonetheless, this is a landmark treatise that is unsurpassed in its energetic exegesis, a very welcome addition to labour and welfare scholarship.
Dorothy J. Solinger
University of California, Irvine, USA