Welfare for Autocrats

What are the costs of the Chinese regime's fixation on quelling dissent in the name of political order, or "stability?" In Welfare for Autocrats, Jennifer Pan shows that China has reshaped its major social assistance program, Dibao, around this preoccupation, turning an effort to alleviate poverty into a tool of surveillance and repression. This distortion of Dibao damages perceptions of government competence and legitimacy and can trigger unrest among those denied benefits. Pan traces how China's approach to enforcing order transformed at the turn of the 21st century and identifies a phenomenon she calls seepage whereby one policy--in this case, quelling dissent--alters the allocation of resources and goals of unrelated areas of government. Using novel datasets and a variety of methodologies, Welfare for Autocrats challenges the view that concessions and repression are distinct strategies and departs from the assumption that all tools of repression were originally designed as such. Pan reaches the startling conclusion that China's preoccupation with order not only comes at great human cost but in the case of Dibao may well backfire.

Pan has produced an exceptionally researched, brilliantly and imaginatively conceptualized study of the scheme initiated in China in 1999 to placate millions of then lately laid-off members of the proletariat. Using sophisticated computational and statistical work, in addition to exhaustive documentary study and a large range of field interviews, Pan demonstrates that the regime has been using this policy as a form of what she coins 'repressive assistance,' meaning that the government relies on local agents' allocation of benefits and home visits as a means of surveillance. The book flashes with arresting insights and often uncovers new interpretations., Built on intensive micro-level research and a deep knowledge of Chinese politics, this book is immensely revealing about ways in which the Chinese regime distributes social benefits and more generally about the processes whereby policies fashioned for one purpose can be diverted to serve others. With sparkling insight, the book advances our understanding of how the Chinese regime mobilizes networks of social relations and a digital economy to maintain its power with important implications for many authoritarian welfare states.

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