The Confucian Family Instead of the Welfare State? Reform and Peasant Welfare in Post-Mao China

ASIANPERSPECTIVE, Vol. 17, No. 3, Spring-Summer 1993, pp. 169-200 THE CONFUCIAN FAMILY INSTEAD OF THE WELFARE STATE? REFORM AND PEASANT WELFARE IN POST-MAO CHINA* Kyung-Sup Chang Post-Mao China's rural reform has been primarily con­ ceived, both by Chinese leaders and scholarly observers, as a transformation of the rural production systems. However, there is another, no less consequential aspect of the ongoing changes in peasant life—namely, the demise of the collective welfare sys­ tems. The pre-reform collective organizations were supposed to eliminate any need for separate welfare policies through the "rectified" social relations of production for the entire peasant population. By contrast, the family-based, market-oriented eco­ nomic activities in the reform period tend to threaten more and more people's secure income opportunities and thus necessitate independent welfare mechanisms in villages (Chow, 1988; Davis, 1989). The institutional decollectivization in the reform period has * This paper was supported by a non-directed research grant from the Korea Research Foundation in 1992, and by a research grant from the Center for the Comparative Study of Development, Brown University. Some of the ideas in this paper were presented at the 1991 Annual Meeting of the Eastern Sociological Society, Providence, RI. The author is indebted to Martin Brockerhoff , Phil Brown, Shenyang Guo, James W. McNally, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Mee-Kyung Suh for careful comments and suggestions at various stages of the research. 169 170 Kyung-Sup Chang generated an inevitable consequence of threatening the financial and organizational foundations of the rural welfare systems, which had operated as part of the collective production organi­ zations. Furthermore, the fiscal crisis of the Chinese state makes it difficult to financially compensate for the weakened collective welfare (Davis, 1989). To make matters worse, the personnel of rural welfare institutions, such as barefoot doctors, are increas­ ingly lured into personalized professional service sectors under the changing economic environment. It seems critical that all these setbacks are occurring when social groups in need of welfare benefits are rapidly increasing. While some people have been "allowed to get rich first" (Deng, 1987: 12) under the liberal development strategy of market socialism, many others have been left rather impoverished and unprotected (Hinton, 1990; Selden, 1988). In addition, more and more people enter into transitional, insecure workplaces; rural towns are increasingly populated with migrants who lack basic living accommodations; and the Chinese population is now rapidly 'aging/ mainly as a result of an effective family plan­ ning effort. Facing all these problems, the Chinese state does not seem to have any other option than encouraging peasant fami­ lies to reinforce their traditional functions for rural welfare. Of course, the role of the family in supporting the elderly and children and in internally sharing frequent economic desti­ tution has long been acknowledged and even encouraged by the Chinese state, except during the communalization drive in the late 1950s. Relatively, the pre-reform rural welfare systems in general were much worse equipped and financed than the urban welfare systems—one of the core aspects of the dualist position of the Chinese state (Chang, 1993c). Even the much publicized "five guarantees" were mostly provided by the fami­ ly itself, while the redistributive mechanism of collective funds played only a supplementary role. In the reform period, the Chinese state has increased even further its dependence on the family and on the mutual aid tra­ dition among peasant families in providing material relief for needy family members and neighbors. Although the use of the familial organization for rural welfare still needs to be support­ ed with tax benefits and other comprehensive state supports, the Chinese state has merely issued frequent calls for rural wel- The Confucian Family Instead of the Welfare State? 171 fare reform instead of launching decisive policy measures. The success or effectiveness of this strategic dependence on the fam­ ily will be largely determined by the extent of economic inequality and social differentiation created in the marketplace. The irony is that those families that are less successful in captur­ ing new private economic opportunities — and thus need wel­ fare protection—are also less likely to have sufficient family resources and networks for self-support. The Chinese...