ABSTRACT
The idea of launching a high-profile China/UK comparative social policy (CSP) workshop turned out to be a timely proposition - for two main reasons. First, the experience of uneven, unfettered economic liberalization had alerted Chinese authorities to the importance of responding to some of the consequences of this upheaval, not least in the interests of maintaining vital social stability. The second factor has been the intervening build-up of western social science interest in contemporary China, not merely as a consequence of its much awaited entry into the World Trade Organization but, more fundamentally, as a result of China's unprecedented drive to catch up with the developed world, via its very own crash course in economic liberalization without political liberalization. The ambition remains to encourage ever more comparativists, and others active in the fields of social policy-making and delivery, to look on CSP as being about more than the comparison of western style welfare states, from western points of view.
