Welfare for Autocrats - How Social Assistance in China Cares for Its Rulers

Over the past two decades, maintaining political order has been the Chinese regime's primary goal. This book shows how China's preoccupation with "stability" (political order) seeps into unrelated policies in previously unexplained ways. This "seepage" has affected China's Dibao program, the world's largest welfare program of its kind. For the first time ever, this book shows how seepage works, what motivates it, what its effects are, and how seepage can backfire, ironically leading to protests and discontent. This book explores the primacy of political order and challenges how we think about welfare, institutional change, repression, surveillance, and collective action.

List of contents

• Chapter 1: Introduction: The Primacy of Political Order


• Chapter 2: Becoming Fixated on Political Order


• Chapter 3: Reacting at the Hint of Disorder


• Chapter 4: Distributing Social Assistance to Preempt Disorder


• Chapter 5: Repressing with Social Assistance


• Chapter 6: Triggering Backlash


• Chapter 7: Becoming a Digital Dictatorship


• Appendices


• Supplementary Materials

About the author

Jennifer Pan is an Assistant Professor of Communication, and an Assistant Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science and Sociology at Stanford University.

Product details

• Authors: Jennifer Pan, Jennifer (Assistant Professor of Communicatio Pan
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 24.06.2020
• EAN: 9780190087432
• ISBN: 978-0-19-008743-2
• No. of pages: 248
• Subjects: Social sciences, law, business > Political science > Political science and political education; China, POLITICAL SCIENCE / Geopolitics, POLITICAL SCIENCE / International Relations / General, Geopolitics, POLITICAL SCIENCE / Comparative Politics, Comparative Politics