Let me begin by thanking Manfred Elfstrom for his review and Daniel O’Neill for the invitation to engage in this exchange. One insight revealed by putting Elfstrom’s Workers and Change in China in dialogue with my book, Welfare for Autocrats, which would not have been evident had each book been examined separately, is the distance between workers and welfare in China today. Classically, workers and welfare are integrally related (e.g., Piven and Cloward’s Regulating the Poor: The Function of Public Welfare, 1971; Esping-Andersen, Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, 1990). However, welfare policy is largely absent from Elfstrom’s Workers and Change in China, and workers are largely absent from Welfare for Autocrats.

There are strong historical links between worker mobilization and welfare reform in China. The creation of the Dibao social assistance program was integrally linked to large-scale labor protests in the 1980s, which garnered widespread societal support. However, Welfare for Autocrats shows that, as of the 2010s, Dibao policy focuses on those who cannot participate in the labor market and those whom the Chinese regime sees as potential threats to political order. In the Pearl River Delta where worker resistance is boundary-spanning and transgressive, demands for substantive (as opposed to marginal) changes in welfare policy are not observed by Elfstrom.

The current disconnect between welfare and workers may be a consequence of—or, at the very least, reinforced by—one mode of demobilization common to both books: preemptive repression. Both books describe how local governments in China use monitoring and surveillance to forestall workers and others from engaging in protest and contention. Workers and Change in China describes how this plays out through “preemptive governance” in the Yangtze River Delta. Welfare for Autocrats reveals preemptive repression in the targeted population program and the distribution of Dibao benefits to constrain the behavior of would-be protestors.

Where does preemptive repression come from? Welfare for Autocrats shows that preemptive repression is inextricably linked to China’s policy of Comprehensive Management of Public Security (CMPS), and specifically how CMPS expanded after 2001 to move policing of political and social order beyond the security apparatus to all functional bureaucracies. Although Elfstrom has no theoretical issue with how CMPS tactically changed the way China pursued social and political order, he questions whether the Chinese regime has fundamentally altered its approach to political order. This line of questioning may in part reflect just how influential China’s current conception of what it calls “stability” has become—how the importance of stability has become ingrained in the thinking of Chinese elites, the Chinese public, and those who research China. One way to recognize the change in the Chinese regime’s approach of stability is to focus on the relationship between economic development and stability. In the 1980s and 1990s, policy documents and official speeches reflect a belief that economic development, and the attendant structural changes required to grow the economy, would lead to social instability. For the past decade or two, the belief is that economic development is essential to ensuring social stability. Put side by side, these are two drastically different conceptions of the world: economic growth causes instability versus economic growth causes stability. In a world where economic growth causes instability, economic growth is the goal and instability a necessary byproduct. In a world where economic growth causes stability, stability is the goal and economic growth simply a tool. What Welfare for Autocrats argues is that emphasizing stability as an end goal did not stem from a conscious decision by the CCP to alter China’s macro strategy but rather from a paradigm shift that began in the early 2000s and has become deeply rooted today.