Welfare, Wealth, and Poverty in Urban China: The Dibao and its Differential Disbursement

Harvard University's Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies hosts Dorothy Solinger as part of the New England China Seminar.

The New England China Seminar:

5:15 pm  – Lecture by Thomas P. Bernstein, Columbia University, click here. (USCI)

6:30 pm – Dinner Option.

We welcome participants who wish to attend both sessions of the New England China Seminar to join colleagues for a buffet dinner at 6:30-7:30 pm, in Room S030. The dinner cost is $15 per person ($10 for students). Due to space limitations, we will accept 30 reservations on a first come first serve basis. Advance reservation and payment is required. Please register before noon on Thursday, September 15, 2011, by clicking here.

7:30 pm Welfare, Wealth, and Poverty in Urban China: The Dibao and its Differential Disbursement

Most studies of social protection investigate welfare in democracies at the national level, and typically ask how welfare affects voting. Professor Solinger considers social assistance in authoritarian China at the urban level, and finds dissimilar logics influencing the decisions concerning distribution among lower-level administrators.  There appear to be two modes of social policy implementation, which vary with the fiscal capacity of a given city. Wealthier cities prefer to push off the streets those viewed as unsuited to a modern city, allocating them a substantial proportion of their social assistance funds.  Poorer areas seem to permit such people to work outside, in the hope that they will thus be better able to support themselves, thereby saving the city money.

Dorothy J. Solingeris professor of political science at the University of California, Irvine. She has been a fellow at the Center for Chinese Studies, University of California, Berkeley; visiting research associate at the Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan; national fellow at the Hoover Institution; and fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.  She served as director of Regional Seminars on Modern China at the University of Pittsburgh, adjunct visiting research scholar at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University, and co-director of Asian Studies at UC, Irvine, where she has been a professor of political science since 1986. Her book Contesting Citizenship in Urban China won the Association for Asian Studies’ Levenson prize for the best book on twentieth-century China published in 1999. She has written, edited, and co-edited many other books and journal articles. Her most recent book, States' Gains, Labor's Losses (2009) was recognized as an “Outstanding Academic Title” by Choice magazine.