Current Issue
Vol.68 No.1
March, 2025
Beyond the Urban-Rural Gap? Exploring Inter-Provincial Welfare Disparities of Dibao in China
Yu-tzu Lo ;Shih-jiunn Shi
Recent studies on expanding social welfare in China argued that local governments increase social spending and enhance public welfare to preclude social unrest and to maintain the regime legitimacy. Some suggest that local bureaucracies, financial conditions, and the levels of economic development significantly influence local welfare performance, leading to unequal resource distribution. Meanwhile, since the planned economy era, central government has focused on industrial development and has relied on the household registration (hukou) system to regulate social mobility. These policies have led to welfare development gaps between urban and rural areas. Against this background, this paper aims to address the issues of whether local welfare disparities in China still persist; and what the main factors are that influence local welfare expansion. To achieve this goal, the present study focuses on the “Minimum Living Standard Guarantee” (Dibao) program-China’s innovative and relatively equitable welfare policy-as the analytical locus. Using political and economic data from 31 provinces from 2007 to 2022, the study conducts a longitudinal analysis. The research design employs the proportion of the population receiving Dibao benefits and Dibao standards in each province as the dependent variable. Independent variables include social stability, provincial finances, trade openness, and the urban-rural gap. The empirical analysis reveals that Dibao policies exhibit significant implementation differences between urban and rural areas, along with inconsistencies in distribution rules of resources. More specifically, the study finds out that the larger the urban-rural gap, the fewer resources are allocated to rural Dibao. This indicates that the government’s
urban-biased development strategy has persisted; and continues to adversely affect local welfare disparities.
Keywords:Dibao, Welfare Sub-Nationalization, Urban-Rural Gap, Social Security, China
Hong Kong Buddhism and Nationalism: From Give Way to Come out 2000~2020
Lawrence Yue-kwong Lau
This article is a study on Hong Kong Buddhism’s evolution of political expression during 2000~2020, regarding Chinese nationalism. Several symbolic events with certain implication of political identity respectively from these two decades, are put under further analysis. For the 2000s, the cases of “Tong style” discourse of wooden monastic architecture, silenize a local Eurasian artist’s contribution on Buddha statue, Buddha’s birthday as a public holiday, and Buddhist group’s legislative lobbying for the criminal bill against folk religion are picked up to indicate that the local monks disregard they regularly attend the official occasion, they carefully avoid be associated with far radical nationalism, to maintain a visible distance from the political viewpoint rarely admitted by the mainstream Hong Kong population. Yet, for 2010s, due to Beijing’s “Belt and Road” Initiative, Buddhism in P.R. China has a new political role in the state’s Southeast Asia strategy. Due to “Hong Kong, China” has her unique locus in the geopolitics between China and Southeast Asia, Buddhism of the city also assigned her task of Buddhist diplomacy, to participate in the overseas development of so-called China’s “religion territories”. Under this new circumstance, Hong Kong Buddhism is expected to uphold a more affirmative nationalist standpoint than usual. This standpoint shifts from “give way” to “come out” is actualized by a new term of monastic leadership assignment in Hong Kong. The monastic elites with China background but received decades of academic training in different countries. From Beijing’s perspective, their political reliability, religious and academic profession are able to ensure that the Buddhist diplomacy affiliated with the “Belt and Road” Initiative can be counted on, rather than the poorly educated and religious misbehaving local monastic leaders. Under this ideological context, Buddhism, as a “mainstream” religion of local Chinese, had gone through years of discrimination during the British colonial period, is emphasized by the authority and Buddhist circle, especially among the pro-Beijing monastic community. The claim is said to be proved by several other “evidences” such as Chinese Temple Ordinance and etc, but sincere studies on those cases find it is groundless and not correspond with the history.
Keywords:Hong Kong Buddhism, Religious-Political Relations of Hong Kong, Buddhism and Chinese Nationalism, United Front of Buddhism, Buddhist Diplomacy
Bureaucratic “Reinterpretation” of Leaders’ Ideologies: A Case Study of People’s Daily’s Commentary on Xi Jinping Thought on Diplomacy
Yi-nung Tsai ;Yen-chieh Liao
Ideology plays a pivotal role in maintaining the stability of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime. Some studies reveal that the construction of ideology is not entirely monolithic, as seen through the official process of ideological formulation. After an ideology is established, bureaucratic organizations may engage in “reframing” its statements. However, existing research seldom examines whether bureaucratic organizations rewrite ideological narratives when it pertains to foreign affairs or how the naming of a leader’s ideology influences foreign policy discourse. This paper takes the People’s Daily commentaries on “Xi Jinping Thought on Diplomacy” as a case study, adopting the concept of the CCP’s “writing teams” to address these issues. Our research approach involves marking the bureaucratic affiliations of commentary authors during data collection and analyzing the data using Automated Text Summarization and the Wordfish Poisson Scaling Model for ideal point estimation. The findings show that differences in authors’ bureaucratic affiliations correspond to variations in the spatial distribution of their ideological stances. This supports the argument that bureaucratic organizations use ideological narratives to signal their positions, even within the realm of foreign policy.
Keywords:Ideology, Quantitative Text Analysis, Ideal Point Estimation, Xi Jinping Thought on Diplomacy, People’s Daily
China’s Way of Subduing Enemy without Fighting
Book Review：Siebens, James A. (Ed.). (2024). China’s Use of Armed Coercion: To Win without Fighting. Routledge.
Arthur S. Ding