Professor Yujeong Yang’s book published in December 2025, The Politics of Inclusion and Exclusion: Pensions, Labor Informalization, and Labor Mobility in China, asks and answers the following overarching questions: why are informal workers treated by China’s local states in a different way? Why are some of them incorporated into the pension system while others aren’t? Her primary argument is that local state capacity (i.e., as a function of local fiscal capacity, labor net outflow, and the portion of informal workers in the labor market according to Chapter 5) determines whether localities incorporate informal workers into the pension system. She argues that when localities find it necessary and inevitable to grant social citizenship membership to informal workers, they will include these workers in the system. Yet, when localities find it easy to restrict informal workers’ access to such membership, they will exclude them from the system.

I highlight that this book generates three main scholarly contributions to the literature on political science and China studies. First, it casts doubt on one of the assumptions underpinning the selectorate theory. According to Bueno de Mesquita et al. (Reference de Mesquita, Bruce, Siverson and Morrow2003), in many autocracies where there is no election, the number of citizens whose support is vital for regime survival is small. So, many autocrats should be disinclined to invest in public goods. Yang demonstrates the conditions under which they provide welfare for certain types of workers. Second, Yang’s well-justified distinction (i.e., why “informal workers” should merit more academic attention than “formal workers”) contributes to the literature such as Elfstrom (Reference Elfstrom2021) and Rho (Reference Rho2023). The literature has often used the monolithic concept of “workers” and “laborers” although some scholars make a distinction between “residents” and “migrants” in their work. Third, she combines state–society relations and state–business relations without treating them separately, which is rare in the Chinese politics field.

Yujeong Yang’s book builds on her article published in Politics & Society in 2021 and on her doctoral dissertation approved in 2018. However, in this book, Yang has added a huge amount of new content, including current events (a discussion of the political landscape that has unfolded in China since 2021, including President Xi Jinping’s emphasis on “common prosperity,” starting on page 154, for instance) as well as recent work published by other scholars. To be more specific, on page 7, she engages with Ratigan (Reference Ratigan2022). On page 160, she also engages with Vortherms (Reference Vortherms2023). Her book also offers broad implications (11, 21, 28, 157, etc.) for other countries regardless of regime types, especially in the 2020s when jobs are becoming more outsourced, insecure, and informal. Based on this, I believe that her theory is also applicable to countries such as Colombia, Romania, and Serbia where the portion of informal workers in the labor market already moved beyond 50 percent.

Despite her scholarly contributions, the book should have more sufficiently addressed two points. First, the role of fiscal capacity is under-theorized. One of her assumptions is that local states will try to use fiscal and administrative resources efficiently since resources are finite. Nevertheless, pages 117 and 121 are the only places where Yang meaningfully discusses the roles of local fiscal capacity in local welfare policy. Second, she highlights that her theory is different from the available literature. She shows that what agendas politicians prioritize is not the only variable that impacts welfare policies of autocracies. Clearly, this point was not sufficiently addressed by the literature. The point that needs to be more thoroughly explained is as follows: on page 32, she suggests that her findings (i.e., the welfare policy of an autocracy is formulated according to the “scope” of concerns of some specific types of citizens, that is, informal workers) contribute to the literature.

Since her book posits that Chinese politicians rely primarily on non-violent tools (also known as co-optation or accommodation) to shape state–society relations, some people might ask the following question: how can the Chinese central/local states manage the latent probability of social unrest which could arise from the rising number of informal workers? This can be one of the research questions for future researchers. For example, will China still be able to exclude informal workers from the welfare system, even when they are capable of restricting informal workers’ access to social citizenship membership? Will the lack of pensions offered to informal workers result in increased (or decreased) repression in the regions? If we followed Elfstrom (Reference Elfstrom2021), we could expect that the Chinese central/local states will adopt both accommodation and repression. Is the relationship between accommodation and repression substitutive or complementary?