Since 2015 rights-based NGOs, lawyers, feminists and journalists have endured the most stringent crackdown since 1989. Simultaneously the Xi Li administration has pushed forward a series of laws, policies and regulatory changes to enable service-oriented NGOs to apply for government contracts to provide welfare services. This seemingly Janus-like policy of welfarist incorporation can be traced back to the Hu–Wen period, often described as a lacklustre period, despite significant efforts to tackle issues of poverty and inequality. This article argues for a more balanced appraisal of this period by exploring in depth the complex politics underpinning efforts to pluralize welfare provision by involving service-oriented NGOs. It explores three sets of politics influencing this policy process: inter-institutional politics; state/non-state actor politics; and domestic/external politics. Furthermore, it considers processes of gradual institutional change adopted by key political actors to achieve these ends.

Previous research has credited China's top leaders, Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, with the social policies of their decade in power, arguing that they promoted these policies either for factional reasons or to achieve rational, problem-solving goals. But such arguments ignore the dominant “fragmented authoritarian” model of policymaking in China that centres on bargaining among bureaucratic agencies. This article asks whether top leadership factions, rational problem solving, or “fragmented authoritarianism” can explain the adoption of one of the Hu and Wen administration's flagship policies, New Rural Cooperative Medical Schemes. Based on a careful tracing of this policy's evolution, it finds little evidence for these explanations, and instead uncovers the role played by international events and organizations, and ideas they introduced or sustained within policy networks. The article highlights some of the effects that China's international engagement has had on policymaking and the need to go beyond explanations of the policy process that focus solely on domestic actors. It proposes a new model of policymaking, “network authoritarianism,” that centres on policy networks spanning the domestic–international, state–non-state, and central–local divides, and which takes account of the influence of ideas circulating within these networks.

The Hu–Wen era saw significant expansions in social policies in China. How did these policy changes affect income inequality, and did they leave a progressive legacy? Using the China Household income Project (CHIP) 2002, 2007 and 2013 data, this article offers empirical evidence to answer these questions. We find that these social policy changes indeed led to some convergence of the divided urban–rural–migrant social welfare systems and helped curtail the growing income inequality driven by market forces. Measured as the share in household final income, the size of urban social benefits decreased, while those for rural residents and rural-to-urban migrants increased from 2002 to 2013. Social benefits – especially pensions – reduced income inequality in all three groups, although to a much smaller extent for rural residents and migrants as compared to their urban peers. Rural residents also gained from agricultural and livelihood subsidies through the “Building a new socialist countryside” initiative.

The abolition of Agricultural Tax in 2005 was a major policy of the early Hu–Wen administration. But how and why did it happen? Drawing on abundant media reports, archive documents and internal speeches by key policymakers, as well as on the author's interviews, this article argues that this reform was pushed through (the “how”) by “principle-guided policy experimentation” with origins in the period of Jiang Zemin's leadership. Not only does this show policy continuities from the Jiang–Zhu era into the Hu–Wen period, it also reveals a different process of policy experimentation from that identified by Sebastian Heilmann in the economic policy arena. Under principle-guided policy experimentation, Chinese central decision makers first reached consensus on the principle of the Rural Tax and Fee Reform (RTFR) drawing on policy learning from prior bottom-up local experimentation, and then formulated and implemented an experimental programme from the top-down, funding it in order to encourage local governments to participate. The evidence suggests that international, political (rural instability), economic and fiscal considerations came to explain leaders’ decisions (the “why”) on tax reform as much as their individual preferences.

Increasing numbers of Chinese and Japanese speakers have been reporting that their ability to handwrite Chinese characters has been steadily diminishing, a phenomenon which is most likely a result of the growing reliance upon digital technologies. This so-called “character amnesia” has recently attracted a great deal of concern from a large number of observers, especially within the People's Republic of China. Unsurprisingly, many of the concerned participants involved in the discourse on this issue tend to rely on various empirical means in order to illustrate why they consider “character amnesia” such a worrying phenomenon. This article argues, however, that the bulk of this empirical support is unreliable and/or invalid. The article also suggests possible amendments which could hopefully lead to a better understanding of this important subject.

China's blood-borne HIV catastrophe in the 1990s prompted the government to adopt a blood-collection system that combines voluntary donations with the state's monopoly on blood services. Juxtaposing fieldwork and survey data, this study examines how the intricate interplay between government manoeuvres and citizen reactions has led to blood shortages that are serious yet manageable. This article reveals that even though voluntary blood donations are adversely affected by a public distrust of state-run collection agencies, owing to political concerns healthcare officials shirk from engaging with citizens to overcome the distrust. It also finds that the blood shortages are nevertheless largely manageable because the authorities have the capacity to recruit captive donors through work units, with the caveat that such captive practices are used sparingly. Overall, this study argues that the lack of state–society synergy in voluntary donations, while exacerbated by government involvement, is also partially remedied by the government's mobilization of captive donors.