Embracing the market: Examining the consequences for education, housing, and health in Chinese cities

Economic and social reforms have gone hand-in-hand in China. Social policy restructuring has been driven by strategies of privatization, marketization, commodification and socialization with the aim of reducing the state burden of financing and providing social welfare; notably in the three mountains of education, health and housing. While the extent of many of these reforms is known, few studies have undertaken comparisons of hardship across policy domains and within and between cities. Data for this chapter are drawn from a 2004 large household survey of eight Chinese cities. Findings show that hardship resulting from increasing financial burdens for housing, medical care and education is concentrated in poorer inland cities, education and health hardships are related to one another but that housing is more likely to be associated with general hardship in daily life or in cities that are more inland. In conclusion, we reflect upon the implication of these findings for the current governments’ movement toward reversing the “rolling back of the state”. Copyright © 2010 World Scientific Publishing.