Chinese Social Policy in a Time of Transition

The story of China's spectacular economic growth is well known. Less well known is the country's equally dramatic, though not always equally successful, social policy transition. Between the mid- 1990s and mid-2000s---the focal period for this book---China's central government went a long way toward consolidating the social policy framework that had gradually emerged in piecemeal fashion during the initial phases of economic liberalization. Major policy decisions during the focal period included adopting a single national pension plan for urban areas, standardizing unemployment insurance, (re)establishing nationwide rural health care coverage, opening urban education systems to children of rural migrants, introducing trilingual education policies in ethnic minority regions, expanding college enrolment, addressing the challenge of HIV/AIDS more comprehensively, and equalizing social welfare spending across provinces, among others. Unresolved is the direction of policy in the face of longer-term industrial and demographic trends---and the possibility of a chronically weak global economy. Chinese Social Policy in a Time of Transition offers scholars, practitioners, students, and policymakers a foundation from which to explore those issues based on a composite snapshot of Chinese social policy at its point of greatest maturation prior to the 2007 global crisis. Available in OSO: Contributors to this volume - Contributors Bob Adamson Department of International Education and Lifelong Learning Hong Kong Institute of Education Hong Kong, China Feng Anwei School of Education Bangor University Bangor, Gwynedd, United Kingdom Karen Baehler Department of Public Administration and PolicySchool of Public Affairs American University Washington, DC Douglas J. Besharov School of Public Policy University of Maryland College Park, Maryland Mostaem Billah Department of Geography Memorial University of Newfoundland Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada Yanwei Chai Department of Urban and Economic Geography Peking University Beijing, P.R. China Juan Chen Department of Applied Social Sciences Hong Kong Polytechnic University Hong Kong, China Roger Detels School of Public Health University of California Los Angeles Los Angeles, California Martin Evans Oxford Institute of Social Policy University of Oxford Oxford, United Kingdom Barry L. Friedman The Heller School for Social Policy and Management Brandeis University Waltham, Massachusetts Mary E. Gallagher Department of Political Sciences University of Michigan Ann Arbor, Michigan Qin Gao Graduate School of Social Service Fordham University Bronx, New York Song Gao China Academy of Public Finance and Public Policy Central University of Finance and Economics Beijing, China Irwin Garfinkel School of Social Work Columbia University New York, New York Jing Guo School of Social Work University of Hawaii at Manoa Honolulu, Hawaii Emily Hannum Sociology Faculty University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Zhilin Liu School of Pubblic Policy and Management Tsinghua University Beijing, P.R. China Jonathan D. London Department of Asian and International Studies City University of Hong Kong Hong Kong, China Xiangyi Meng China Academy of Public Finance and Public Policy Central University of Finance and Economics Beijing, China Li Qian, School of Foreign Languages Northwest Normal University Lanzhou , P.R. China Liu Quanguo School of Foreign Languages Northwest Normal University Lanzhou , P.R. China Mary Jane Rotheram Center for HIV Identification, Prevention and Treatment Services (CHIPTS) University of California Los Angeles Los Angeles, California Josephine Smart Department of Anthropology University of Calgary Calgary, Alberta Canada Sheena G. Sullivan National Centre for AIDS/STD Control and Prevention Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention Beijing, China School of Public Health University of California Los Angeles School of Public Health Los Angeles, California Reeta Tremblay Department of Political Science University Of Victoria Victoria, British Columbia, Canada Yu Wang Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention Beijing, China Zunyou Wu National Centre for AIDS/STD Control and Prevention Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention Beijing, China School of Public Health University of California Los Angeles Los Angeles, California Wei-Jun Jean Yeung Wei-Jun Jean Yeung Department of Sociology and the Asia Research Institute Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences National University of Singapore, Singapore Xin Zhang School of Public Administration and Policy Renmin University Beijing, China Yuping Zhang Department of Sociology and Anthropology Lehigh University Bethlehem, PA