Social Policy, Redistribution, and Inequality in China

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

As China has transformed into a middle-income industrialized country with global influence, issues centered on high levels of economic inequality have become more politically salient than ever. This panel assembles five papers that study different aspects of inequality in China and its consequences on public opinion and bureaucratic behavior. Lu, Tsai, Trinh, and Zhang’s paper explores whether the government’s commitment to uphold justice and morality enhance tax morale in societies with weak democratic institutions; Chan and Elfstrom’s paper investigates why so many projects associated with China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) use Chinese workers rather than host country workers; Lee and Huang’s paper examines whether and to what extent regional economic disparities affect individuals' perceptions and attribution of (un)fairness; Zhang and Zhang’s paper shows that bureaucratic forbearance of China's social insurance policies has a pro-business bias, which undermined the policies that aimed originally to address inequalities during market reforms; Sun’s paper shows that programmatic distribution can create constituents who are in favor of the status quo because beneficiaries engage in ex-post rationalization. Collectively, with novel evidence and measurement advancement, the studies contribute to our understanding of the political consequences of rising inequality in China.

Sub Unit

• Division 11: Comparative Politics

Individual Presentations

• Do Procedural Justice and Retributive Justice Enhance Support for Property Tax? - Xiaobo Lu, University of Texas at Austin; Lily Tsai, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Minh Duc Trinh, Purdue University; Ping Zhang, Fudan University

• Explaining the Belt and Road Initiative’s Reliance on Chinese Workers - Manfred Elfstrom, University of British Columbia, Okanagan; Anita Chan, Australian National University

• Interregional Inequality, (Un)Fairness Perception and Attribution in China - Dong Wook Lee, Adelphi University; Xian Huang, Rutgers University

• Bureaucratic Forbearance of China's Social Insurance Policies - Hao Zhang, Princeton University; Ye Zhang, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Rationalizing the Status Quo: Evidence from Beijing’s License Plate Lottery - Dehua Sun, University of Rochester

Chair

• Jeremy L. Wallace Johns Hopkins University

Discussant

• Dan Chen University of Richmond