Researchers are subjecting a wide range of different aspects of nondemocratic governance to increasingly sophisticated analysis. This scholarship primarily seeks to understand what Andrew Nathan has influentially dubbed “authoritarian resilience”: the ability of autocrats to hold onto power through institutional innovations of various sorts. Because of its longevity, economic success, and sheer size, the People’s Republic of China—the country that is the origin of Nathan’s term—has come in for special attention in this vein. Jennifer Pan’s recent book, Welfare for Autocrats: How Social Assistance in China Cares for its Rulers, uses China’s Minimum Livelihood Guarantee Scheme (Dibao), an unconditional cash transfer program targeting citizens who earn below a certain threshold, as a starting point for exploring far-reaching questions regarding government responsiveness, surveillance, and legitimacy. In the process, the book both adds to the “resilience” literature and, in important ways, moves past it.

Pan posits that a shift has occurred in the Chinese leadership’s thinking about the relationship between economic, social, and political stability. She argues that when the Dibao program was first implemented, it was intended to deal with the inevitable dislocations caused by the introduction of markets, so that “social instability [did] not hinder the pursuit of economic reform and socialist modernization” (p. 42). However, as an anxious Chinese Communist Party came to treat different forms of stability as fungible, this ordering of priorities broke down, and the logic of security maintenance “seeped” into Dibao. Without a formal change in the mandate or rules of the system, limited welfare funds started to be diverted from ordinary impoverished households to citizens whom the government feared might join protests (“targeted populations”). The distribution of Dibao to people such as petitioners, ex-convicts, and adherents of banned religious groups facilitates repeated interactions between street-level authorities and these potential troublemakers, while rendering the latter indebted to the government but not so well-off as to be independent of the government. According to Pan, however, the results have been decidedly mixed. When unsuccessful Dibao applicants discover the prioritization of targeted populations for benefits, they react with anger; in some instances, the poor have taken to the streets. The government’s image is thereby damaged. Ultimately, authorities may need to reconsider the heuristics they use to identify possible challengers. At present, “recall” (minimizing false negatives) seems to be more urgent for officials than “precision” (minimizing false positives). But tending to such a large number of suspected dissidents, most of whom are unlikely to ever pose a challenge, drains the system.

The book has several strengths. First, it adds to scholars’ theoretical toolkit. Pan introduces two very useful concepts, “seepage” and “repressive assistance,” while carefully distinguishing them from existing adjacent concepts, such as “institutional conversion” (unlike seepage, conversion is the result of pressure from social groups) and “co-optation” (unlike repressive assistance, co-optation takes the form of clientelistic agreements). Furthermore, she expands the discussion beyond various assumed binaries that have constrained analysis of authoritarianism and contentious politics up to now. In particular, the book goes further than my own recent volume (reviewed earlier) by treating repression and responsiveness not only as not fundamentally in conflict with each other but also as sometimes melded to the point of indistinguishability. At the conclusion of the book, Pan reaches beyond her immediate subject matter to offer her thoughts about the future of monitoring and artificial intelligence in China and other autocracies, drawing on ideas from computer science.

Second, Welfare for Autocrats deftly combines several different empirical methods. For instance, to demonstrate that authorities act more responsively when faced with unrest, Pan randomly sent government message boards either a simple request for Dibao assistance or the same request accompanied by a vague threat of collective action (the latter wording generated a stronger reaction). She further shows how Dibao has been politicized by collecting information on ad hoc benefits in 36 cities and determining that these benefits “are much more likely to be announced and distributed prior to and during political meetings and national holidays than other times of the year” (p. 135). Employing a multi-city survey and a dataset of popular protests identified in social media with machine learning, Pan found higher levels of dissatisfaction with government and greater contention in those cities where local governments have announced policies “prioritizing Dibao for individuals undergoing re-education” (p. 150).

Some portions of the book build on previously published journal articles. However, readers familiar with Pan’s other work may be surprised by the role played by fieldwork in this volume. She conducted more than one hundred interviews for the book with neighborhood committee staff and Dibao recipients in four provinces. Sometimes, data from these interviews are incorporated into her quantitative analysis. For example, her conversations with committee staff reveal whether ex-prisoners are targets of Dibao in different places, and this information is then correlated with the surveillance capacity or embeddedness of committees, as measured by the number of residents who can identify their “block captain” in surveys. In other instances, Pan’s interviews serve as powerful evidence in their own right. The book is a model of both attention to detail and creative synthesis.

Finally and most significantly, even as she lays out the logic of Beijing’s approach to welfare spending, Pan breaks with the recent tendency of political scientists to focus overly on the purposes served by various authoritarian institutions at the expense of those institutions’ self-defeating aspects. Anticipating the criticism that the apparent negative feedback in the system she has discovered is really a feature in disguise, Pan writes, “Some might say that the Dibao program creates cleavages and conflicts among the poor that undermine political mobilization.… However, an alternative counterfactual is not a China without Dibao; it is a country where social welfare programs such as Dibao are implemented according to a logic that is readily apparent and agreed up on by all” (p. 161). In this alternate reality, “there would be no discrepancy between the rules and the reality for rules-based resisters to anchor their contention,” and “this decrease in contention and the sources of dissatisfaction would perhaps lead to better evaluations of government capabilities and legitimacy” (p. 161). Here, Pan echoes Mary Gallagher’s recent book, Authoritarian Legality in China: Law, Workers, and the State (2017), which shows how state efforts to bolster the use of individual dispute-resolution channels have created disillusionment among certain groups of workers and, ultimately, frustration with the rule of law more generally on the part of workers and authorities alike. As China, Russia, and other dictatorships loom large in the imagination of policy makers and the public in the United States and elsewhere, more research along these lines, which documents both the rationality and limits of autocratic rule, is sorely needed.

As noted earlier, Pan’s concept of “seepage” is a powerful one. However, her argument that the Chinese government has fundamentally altered its approach to pursuing political order is not entirely convincing. In making this claim, Pan contrasts statements by officials in the 1990s with those of their successors in the aughts. For instance, she highlights a passage in a People’s Daily report from 2001 as revealing a new emphasis on regime resilience: Dibao “has great significance for improving the socialist market economic system, maintaining social stability, ensuring the smooth progress of state-owned enterprise reform, and the long-term security of the country” (p. 38). This statement and others like it are counterpoised with earlier ones like a 1993 call for a “multi-layered social security system that provides urban and rural residents with a degree of security commensurate with China’s reality so as to promote economic development and social stability” (p. 33). Pan concedes that the distinction is a subtle one. However, at least to this reader, who has not pored through documents on the topic, it is not clear that there truly is a meaningful difference. Given the government’s traumatic experience with the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, which combined economic grievances with demands for political liberalization in a potent blend, it is hard to imagine that politicians of the early reform era did not treat economic, social, and political aims as at least somewhat fungible—or that the government of today no longer has any schema in mind in terms of how these different aims relate to each other. Thankfully, the usefulness of the concept of “seepage” does not depend on a dramatic change in macro strategy over time. It is enough that comprehensive stability maintenance is warping the implementation of a range of programs.

It is also not evident that welfare-related protests in and of themselves pose a real problem for the regime. Conflict of this sort makes up a surprisingly large proportion (29%) of the more than 100,0000 collective action events in Pan’s social-media–based dataset (p. 153). The book does not provide information on the scale of these incidents, something that is perhaps difficult to ascertain from social media posts. But Pan notes that “this discontent has not generated any large-scale, cross-class, or cross-regional mobilization” (p. 162). Other areas of Chinese contentious politics have, however, produced just this: labor activism and, to a lesser extent, land and environmental activism. Although organizers in other contexts, such as urban and rural communities of the United States, have used welfare benefits as a powerful rallying point, it seems unlikely that welfare will form the basis for an upsurge in activism in China.

Then again, social movements are not Pan’s focus. In her analysis, the securitization of Dibao does not hurt Communist Party rule because it has the potential to unite large numbers of people against Beijing. Instead, it corrodes poor citizens’ belief in the state’s basic fairness—which is all the more ironic given that the program was rolled out initially to mollify those left behind. The scattered conflicts that “seepage” ignites also wear down the government’s frontline agents. Perhaps, linked with some other set of claims, Dibao resistance might be more explosive. But on its own, it shows the dysfunction created by authorities’ eagerness to transform even routine services into tools of control. As China’s Xi Jinping and other autocrats set their sights on achieving greater harmony at home, this book should serve as a warning.