Welfare Provision, 1949–1979

Abstract

After taking power in 1949, the CCP gradually began to build a basic system for providing public goods. The domestic stability following decades of conflict and revolution allowed economic reconstruction, and the growth that followed enabled China to perform creditably in comparison with other large nations in Asia. In the field of public health, for example, China was able to shake off its tag as the “Sick Man of Asia” and eradicated a number of contagious diseases while bringing others under control. In fact, by the mid-1970s China’s rural public health system was hailed by the WHO as a model for others to follow. Policies put in place basic guarantees for most citizens and for the urban elite they provided a network of welfare benefits that were well above China’s level of economic development. The series of five-year plans that were a feature of China’s form of Soviet development provided for major programs to control the supply of water and to build the basic road and rail infrastructure. Welfare policy and indeed policy in general reflected the interests of those favored by the ideology: government workers, the industrial working class, and soldiers. Others were left to deal with access as best as they could using communal resources. The peasants in whose name the revolution had been fought had to rely on any surplus provided by the collective to cover their welfare needs.