Land for Welfare in China

The Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University presents a talk with Meina Cai who will demonstrate that social welfare provision cannot be understood in isolation from the unique land property rights regime in China.

Why do autocrats provide social welfare to the public? What explains subnational variation in social welfare provision? Postdoctoral fellow Meina Cai will explore these questions in the context of rural China. Drawing on political elite interviews, firsthand observation, Chinese Communist Party and government documents, as well as survey data, she will demonstrate that social welfare provision cannot be understood in isolation from the unique land property rights regime in China. In particular, she will highlight the impact of communist legacies and the interplay between central and local governments on rural social welfare provision and its subnational variation. 

Meina Cai completed her PhD in political science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her research interests lie in the political economy of transition and emerging economies. Her dissertation examines the impact of land property rights on Chinese political economy. She received an MA in political science from the University of Toronto and an MSc in agricultural and applied economics from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She is an An Wang postdoctoral fellow at the Fairbank in 2012-2013.