Path Dependency Reexamined

Chinese Welfare Policy in the Transition to Unemployment

Bibliographic Data

ID6247175
AuthorsDorothy J Solinger (corresponding author)
Year2005
Volume38
Issue1
Pages83
Publication date2005-10-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueComparative Politics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0010-4159 • E-ISSN: 2151-6227
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/20072914
OpenAlexW2333595085
LanguageEN
Citations received16
References cited2

Beginning a decade ago, the Communist Party of China engineered a huge strategic shift in its stance toward its urban labor force. For more than forty years it was the party of the proletariat, governing the cities under the rubric of full, life-time employment, paired with nearly universal welfare and security1 In the mid 1990s it began to abandon the working class and even to encourage massive layoffs of work ers in the name of greater efficiency.2 In the recent era of globalization and hyper competition, left-wing parties that previously sponsored employment, job security, and benefits for workers in other countries, too?France under the Socialist Party and Mexico under the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)?have left workers to their own devices while reducing state-dispensed social protection programs.3 In each of these cases after 1980 the ruling party, once (if in different ways) the patron of the proletariat, initiated and implemented shifts that rejected a critical component of its own social base. In China a reform agenda disavowed Mao Zedong's ideal of an egalitarian, self-sufficient, antimaterialistic China in favor of a globally involved, class-differentiated, profits-driven state/society. France's shift was not so monumental, but its deeper immersion into the European Monetary Union after 1983, with its choice to align its exchange rates more solidly with the rest of the European Community, and later its assent in 1992 to the Maastricht Treaty's goals of low deficits, smaller debt, and higher interest rates, robbed its leaders of the chance to devalue and institute disinflation when necessary to satisfy workers and sustain high employment.4 In Mexico the PRI's decision to pursue first a trade-cum investment liberalization and then a free trade agenda required austerity programs despite falling wages and bankruptcies throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s.5 Yet in each of these countries there are elements of the past that remain below the sur face

Dependency (UML · Development economics · Economic system · Economics · Labour economics · Macroeconomics · Market economy · Path (computing · Path dependency · Political science · Public economics · Transition (genetics · Unemployment · Welfare · Welfare dependency · Computer Science · Labor Movements and Unions · Social Policy and Reform Studies

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