Authoritatian Assistance : Welfare and Wealth in Urban China

Most studies of social protection investigate welfare in democracies at the national level, and typically ask how welfare affects voting. This paper, to the contrary, considers social assistance in authoritarian China at the urban level. It finds two dissimilar logics influencing the distributional decisions of lower-level administrators. That is, there appear to be two modes of social policy implementation, which vary with the fiscal capacity of a given city, as indicated by its average wage: Wealthier cities prefer to push off the streets those viewed as unsuited to a modern city, therefore allocating a substantial proportion of their social assistance funds to them, in order to entice them to stay at home. To the contrary, poorer places 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. A data set from China's Ministry of Civil Affairs was used. The paper demonstrates that specific features of newly emerging capitalism in an authoritarian state can drive welfare spending just as the wish to attract votes does in a democracy