Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Policies have long been regarded as instruments of state governance, especially social policies that redistribute resources and allocate responsibilities. This paper looks into the question of, how does policy design serve an authority that is experiencing tremendous social and economic change, and contribute to the legitimacy of a transitional state? In the reformed welfare system of China, the social rights to income and social security are now defined more frequently on an individual basis, rather than collectively through work units and people’s communes, as they were in the previous system. How does the new system allocate the benefits across different social groups when the institution shifted away from the old communist system? If a new system is building up, how does the state frame and legitimise its new policies? I take the pension reform in China as an example, collect statistical data of benefit distribution and text data of corresponding policy and propaganda to answer these questions. My study argues that, in order to keep public consent under a constraint of limited budget, the central government’s strategy of welfare entitlement differentiation is favouring the core elites, distributing the limited fiscal capacity to the social group which costs minimum per unit. The weapon of redistributive equality is wielded when necessary, and to a certain extent, along with propaganda persuasion. The persuasion that attempted to shape public opinion and expectation produces intentional truth and knowledge about pension benefits, responsibility and accountability allocation, and constructed the image of deserving ones and undeserving ones.