China’s welfare boost also boosted the regime’s credibility
To what extent have welfare attitudes changed as a new Chinese social security system has emerged? Drawing on nationally representative datasets from the China Inequality and Distributive Justice Survey Project for 2004, 2009 and 2014, a new study by Kristin Dalen finds that support for government provision of welfare has increased substantially within all population groups since 2004. Furthermore, traditional social cleavages, such as the urban–rural divide, seem to lose strength as a predictor of redistributive preference, possibly "deactivating" these social cleavages as vehicles of political mobilisation.
7 September 2021
