The Politics of China’s Pension Reform in State and Public Institutions

With over twenty years of government efforts, the Chinese government finally launched a pension reform in 2015, with an intention to end the dual-track pension system between enterprise workers and publicly-financed personnel. Scholars in the field of China’s pension policy mostly focus on the remarkable institutional equity side of the reform, however, they underexplore a significant policy change occurred after 2015 in relation to tightening privileged pension rights of civil servants and public institution employees. Adapted from welfare retrenchment theories developed in multi-party democracies, my research aims to answer the question of how China’s national authorities and subnational governments pushed through and implemented a pension reform for publicly-financed personnel despite opposition and resistance. I find that there was a two-level use of government strategies, some—but not all—of which resembled those used in multi-party democracies. At the national level, the central government used similar strategies of obfuscation, division and compensation, and developed a new strategy of expectation shaping. Locally, subnational governments used similar strategies of obfuscation and compensation, and developed new strategies of persuasion and delay. This research improves our understanding of retrenchment process in single-party political systems such as China.

Zihui Xie is a PhD student in Politics at the University of Glasgow. She received her bachelor’s degree in social security from Jilin University, and master’s degree in social policy from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her PhD thesis focuses on the politics of China’s pension reform in state organs and public institutions by using methods including in-depth interviews, documentary analysis and process tracing method. Her PhD project was partially funded by the UCCL Travel and Study Grants and the GBCET Awards. Her research interests include China’s pension reform and Chinese politics, comparative politics, policy-making processes, policy change and institutional change.

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