Welfare Regimes in China and Vietnam

Abstract

This essay investigates how the degeneration of state socialist regimes and the transition to market-Leninist political economies in China and Vietnam have shaped institutional arrangements governing welfare and its stratification effects. Engaging recent theoretical literature one welfare regimes, the article explores how the evolution of specific combinations of political and economic institutions in China and Vietnam has affected the production and reproduction of welfare and stratification. The common assumption that welfare regimes reflect the structured interests of dominant political and economic actors and thus serve to reproduce that regime is found to invite an excessively static perspective. Instead this essay argues that welfare regimes and stratification in contemporary China and Vietnam require an appreciation of their properties under state-socialism and how specific paths of extrication affected their degeneration and subsequent development under a new form of political economy. The essay also probes the significance of observed differences in China and Vietnam’s political structure in light of suggestions that Vietnam’s more pluralistic political system has made its welfare regime more redistributive than China’s. An alternative perspective suggests China’s wealth obviates the significance of such differences.