From "socializing" to "regulating"

: a comparative study of non-state elder care homes in China

Abstract

The market reform and openness in the post-Mao era has yielded enormous changes in the Chinese society. The most radical of these is the emergence of social organizations. Nevertheless, China's civil society continues to be a "state-led civil society" because the government plays a leading role in the survival of social organizations. Policies of NGOs are colored by pragmatism, and the state favors organizations providing social services to fulfill people's welfare needs and tackle social problems. In this context, non-state welfare organizations have grown at a rapid rate when the state retreated from direct provision and launched the official campaign labeled "socializing social welfare" to diversify the welfare delivery. For a long time, the study of non-state welfare organizations was marginalized and underestimated by academia due to the insufficiencies of current theoretical perspectives. To fill this deficiency and put non-state welfare into the spotlight, this study attempts to develop a new regulatory perspective that emphasizes the impact of social context on third sector welfare provision in China. Including residential elder care homes in its samples, this study delineate the regulatory framework governing non-state welfare provision, and examines whether the regulation has indeed enhanced non-state welfare provision in China. It seeks to clarify the dynamics of state regulation, the main policy tools, and the evolution of non-state agencies under regulation. In particular, a comparative study of Shanghai and Guangzhou highlights the substantial variation that exists with regard to regulatory practices and the evolutionary paths of non-state welfare organizations. This study reveals that the current welfare arrangement can be attributed to a quasi-mixed economy of welfare because the regulatory authority has never been diversified. The purpose of the state in regulating non-state elder care homes lies not only on meeting people's need for residential elder care, but also in enhancing the tertiary industry and maintaining social stability. Four policy tools - planning, financial inducement, standard-setting and enforcement, and self-regulation are adopted by the civil affairs bureau, the de facto single regulator to regulate non-state elder care homes. In particular, the regulatory practice in Shanghai is prone to be active and top-down while in Guangzhou, the government follows a passive and bottom-up approach. The comparison shows that the enhanced regulation can promote the quantitative growth of non-state care agencies, but it cannot significantly benefit the development of non-state welfare organizations in terms of qualitative issues. This study attempts to contribute to build on the Chinese regulatory state by incorporating a "social" perspective to reveal the motives of regulation on the third sector welfare and justify the use of mechanics in the process. At the same time, it seeks to clarify the hybrid nature of China's new welfare economy. Moreover, this study argues that the "administrative absorption of society" has not benefited the development of social organizations. The next task for us is not integrating social sectors to form the bulk of new state agents, but cultivating self-governance of social organizations.

Date of Award	2 Oct 2013
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	City University of Hong Kong
Supervisor	Linda WONG (Supervisor)