Radical Inequalities: China’s Revolutionary Welfare State in Comparative Perspective by Nara Dillon (review)

Rampant inequality and social stratification is so closely tied to the narrative of China’s “reform and opening up” that we are apt to forget its historical roots. As Jeremy Brown has shown with respect to northern China, urban spaces in the Mao era were sites of immense economic privilege.¹ Under Mao, people did everything in their power to retain the right to reside in urban areas and avoid exile to the countryside. In Radical Inequalities, Nara Dillon’s detailed focus on the welfare state adds to our understanding of the history of socioeconomic inequality in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Her study examines welfare reform between the 1940s and the 1960s in order to understand the “paradox of an unequal communist welfare state” (p. 4). As befits the complex nature of policy formation in China, Dillon approaches her historical case study from two angles. First, she charts the changing goals of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) central leadership and the political machinations that affected the policy-making process. Second, using an impressive range of new sources from the Shanghai Municipal Archives, Dillon traces how ordinary Chinese citizens responded to new welfare initiatives. Furthermore, Radical Inequalities looks at welfare provision for a range of socioeconomic constituencies, allowing us to see the push-pull relationship between different welfare programs. Dillon’s expansive approach allows her to address not only the growing urban–rural divide in the Maoist welfare state, but also the creation of inequalities within urban populations.

After tracing the pre-1949 origins of welfare policy, Dillon starts her in-depth discussion of welfare in the 1950s. Suddenly facing the momentous task of administering an entire nation, the CCP created limited welfare coverage for workers in key industries and started some unemployment relief programs. Despite limits on coverage, the CCP was able to extend welfare to around ten times as many workers as the Kuomintang. The Party also made welfare a political issue at the grassroots in the 1950–1951 Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries. In Shanghai, union cadres used the campaign in factories to encourage workers to vet each other’s personal histories and collectively decide individual entitlement to labor insurance. Workers responded with gusto: whether out of concerns about “fairness” or to show their active participation, workers deemed over 5 percent of their colleagues undeserving of labor insurance.

After these years of transitionary consolidation, from 1952 the welfare state was closely tied to the Party’s adoption of an economic program modeled on the experience of the Soviet Union. In line with a vigorous push to build an industrialized command economy, the Party rapidly expanded welfare coverage for workers and the unemployed. Dillon makes the compelling but counterintuitive argument that the Party’s efforts were undermined not by its inadequacies but by its over-ambition. For example, the center devised the Universal Job Placement program as a form of unemployment relief; the program aimed to register the large numbers of urban unemployed and place them in new jobs that would theoretically be created in the Soviet-style economic model. Unfortunately, structural issues in the economy ensured that the predicted demand for labor failed to materialize, leaving the CCP unable to make a success of the job placement program. Taking matters into their own hands, unemployed Shanghainese took to the streets to voice their dissatisfaction with the lack of jobs and the government’s job allocation bureaucracy. Rather than integrating more people into the welfare state, the policies of the 1952–1954 period alienated, frustrated, and further differentiated parts of the urban population.

Despite splits in the central leadership about how to adapt the Soviet model, different groups at the Party center agreed that state spending had to decrease. In other words, by 1955, there was a consensus on the need for budgetary austerity. In a process known as “ruralization” (下放), the government transferred unlucky urban residents...