Since its reform and opening, China's rapid economic growth and social change have been carried out in an experimental and progressive manner centered on local governments. This process led to the spread of nationwide reform and opening through the ra...
Since its reform and opening, China's rapid economic growth and social change have been carried out in an experimental and progressive manner centered on local governments. This process led to the spread of nationwide reform and opening through the rapid economic growth of some regions with political and economic conditions on the one hand, but on the other, the pragmatic reforms under "developmental pluralism" brought about the exclusion and stratification of very complex patterns in the daily lives of ordinary people as socialist emulsion and marketization became intertwined not only individually. Practical reforms have greatly expanded the opportunities for ordinary people to pursue better life opportunities individually and collectively in the development process, but also, in the process, various complaints and anger over the discriminatory and differential citizenship that accompanies development pluralism have accumulated within individuals and groups. Welfare is at the heart of that complaint, and it has begun to emerge as a major social issue.
This paper looks at how it has been localized around the Guangdong region, which has the largest scale of peasant work, on the "welfare expansion" for the peasant masses, which has been promoted at the Chinese national level since the early and mid-2000s. The concept of development citizenship as a development contribution right, which described the developmentist experience of Korean society, can be defined as an effective and/or just demand for national and social resources, opportunities and/or respect (Chang, 2014: 175) for citizens' accumulated contributions to the development purpose of a country or society, and this paper applies to the issue of 'welfare' that is made around the development contribution of local countries and urban owners of Chinese society.
In the early 2000s, in the process of the Chinese state attempting various institutional and policy transitions for sustainable economic growth, the local state was given function as the main actor of development and also as a major enforcer in the welfare sector. The issue of "welfare" has generated much attention both at home and abroad, especially in China, where urban migrants represented by farmers' communists are the biggest contributors to the reform-and-open system but have been the most excluded victims from its development achievements.
Guangdong was the first place for reform and opening up, the region with the most urban migration along with the fastest economic growth, and in the developed cities of Zhu River Triangle, much of the actual population (especially the labor force) consisted of peasants. By the 1990s, however, urban migrants in Guangdong had become the most marginalized between the continuation of the welfare system centered on the Hogu system and the marketized welfare since its reform and opening. In this regard, China's reform and opening-up system effectively excluded more than 200 million peasant-public reserve forces from the city's various services and education systems, creating an "efficient" system in which Chinese states and businesses are not responsible for the cost of their social reproduction.
In this regard, the context of expanding the "welfare" of farmers' communists in Guangdong since the early and mid-2000s carries significant significance for the sustainability of China's reform and opening system. In addition to the recognition of the "development contribution" to the peasantry at the national level, local governments in Guangdong have rediscovered the peasant public by new socioeconomic needs. In particular, as the sustainability of existing policy preferential treatment and speciality-based development methods was seriously questioned in the wake of intensifying regional/local competition following the nationwide expansion of reform and opening in the early and mid 2000s, the peasantry emerged as a major issue as the actual population in Guangdong. Local governments in Guangdong have begun to recognize the "development contribution" of urban migrants in various aspects, including workers, residents, consumers, taxpayers and social participation. In the process, not only "new workers," but also "new citizens," but also "advanced people," "gentlemen" and "new zealots" were raised, along with the reorganization of the welfare system encompassing them, as well as the cumulative degree of development contributions at the local government level in the 2010s, a "study-based welfare system" that allows for a certain degree of survival.
The scoring system is a representative form of local social citizenship in Guangdong, functioning as an institutional framework to provide farmers with a significantly improved form of "welfare" to the peasants, along with residence in Guangdong. Based on stable employment and residence in Guangdong, mid- to long-term cumulative development contributions in the province were officially approved through various scoring indicators established by the local government (education, functional/technical qualifications, tax and social insurance payments, investment/starting, residence, social participation, etc.) and provided a path for obtaining full citizenship of the province in a more comprehensive, standard and transparent manner than in the past. Although it is not comparable to those enthusiastically attracted by local governments, in some cases it has been a significant improvement in the sense that stable welfare can be expected in the future through the acquisition of their own educational and technical qualifications, or in the mid- to long-term employment and residence in the provinces. In doing so, the local government has prepared a system to quickly attract the necessary talent, as well as a major institutional and policy means to nurture and manage the farming public as an internal "actual population." In this process, farmers who have no slogan but already have a "middle class" status were able to acquire urban districts, and farmers with such aspirations were able to secure institutional channels to acquire new urban estates through self-development, such as enhancing their educational background, acquiring technical qualifications and improving their work experience.
But the single-city-based local social citizenship still suffers from many institutional flaws and social controversies. Development contributions based on socio-economic needs have been transformed every year in various ways according to local governments, and the institutional threshold, which is higher than that of ordinary peasants, has generated many social controversies due to its differential and discriminatory nature based on human capital. The most basic problem was the lack of a welfare ideological base and the nature of the integrated nationalization policy as a selective and selective 'welfare' rather than a social right. Despite policy initiatives at the central and Guangdong levels, efforts to expand welfare for farmers as "real residents" face a number of challenges in reality.
First of all, the expected high cost of welfare risks causing social backlash from city government officials and existing residents, while low incentives lacked incentives to lead to the active execution of local officials on the base, even in the actual execution process. Next, the issue of the inclusion in the existing welfare system and the transfer of insurance to workers with stable jobs over a medium- and long-term period was also a condition to reduce the participation rate of farmers. In addition, the most necessary and most marketable education and housing welfare are not meeting the welfare demand of the peasants due to various socioeconomic thresholds and lack of infrastructure, while the achievements of the development projects in the context of urban modernization on the other hand tend to cause the peasants to lose their living base in cities and be pushed further to the suburbs. Finally, the problem that 'welfare' as a developmental nature does not justify 'welfare' as a universal right in national-citizen relations is also a big problem, assuming that it is as much of a burden on the welfare of the family. Generation and gender division within the peasantry family have important characteristics as their survival strategy and livelihood strategy, but as a result, whether the integrated localization strategy can make these families a kind of 'middle class' family that can enjoy more than a certain level of life in cities (or rural areas) remains an important issue.
As migration has become family, long-term and active migration in Guangdong, broad-based areas have been formed at the Guangdong Province level in terms of the supply of welfare, including economic environment and social security, as well as the living base and areas of farmers' commune. Recent strategies for integrated development of large areas and urban and rural areas, such as Yuigangao, may have an improved effect on the farmers' commune as an actual resident of Guangdong, in that it can realize not only the achievements of development but also the flavour of development and welfare, by making development contributions more extensive and transferable than in the past. In addition, the equivalence of basic public services and the development of social services in the social management level provide conditions for not only existing urban residents, but also for participation in the development process of farmers' communes and for enjoying a certain amount of welfare accordingly.
Efforts to expand the people's livelihoods and welfare at the Chinese national level are still facing many challenges, with somewhat improved effects on the welfare exclusionary aspects of the existing peasantry after all. In this regard, welfare as a "developmental contribution" in Chinese society is a process of realizing the people's livelihood and welfare represented by the Xiaokang society at the national level, while strengthening or justifying the new differential and discriminatory civil rights character.