Nara Dillon. Radical Inequalities: China’s Revolutionary Welfare State in Comparative Perspective.

Abstract

Growing up in Cold War America, we heard a common dismissal of communist countries such as China. Sure, they had equality. . . everyone was equally poor! Nara Dillon’s thorough and insightful study reveals how far this assessment was from the truth. Despite the stated goal of eliminating or, at the very least, greatly reducing long-standing income equality, the Chinese welfare state that was created in the wake of the Communist Revolution of 1949, ironically, deepened preexisting and institutionalized new forms of inequality. What happened? Why did “Liberation,” as the Chinese Communist Party has long termed their successful revolution, quickly shift from the rhetoric of empowering the proletariat to the reality of entrenching inequality? The People’s Republic made a promising start, quickly doubling the reach of the urban welfare state. Building on a prerevolutionary, consensus-promoting, broad welfare implementation, the new state instituted a wide-ranging labor insurance program that included everything from maternity leave, through disability benefits and health insurance, to pensions. But these policies reached only a small fraction of the population, those working in big state-owned factories located in cities, the “labor aristocracy.” Even workers in collectively owned enterprises earned only three-quarters of the income of their state-sector counterparts, and few of the welfare benefits.