ABSTRACT
The processes of economic reform and growth in China and Vietnam are bringing with them huge social and economic transformations. Spectacular growth and the social and political consequences of market-generated wealth creation are accompanied by growing inequality, increasing urbanization, new kinds of risk and insecurity for vulnerable groups and a variety of associated tensions and dislocations. Forms of protection and security that were associated with the command economy have been undermined and replaced by new modes of welfare provision and new kinds of citizen entitlements. For most people, access to benefits is no longer connected with stable membership of local work units but is increasingly the product of other factors: self-reliance or community self-help; a history of compulsory contributions linked to employment; or a claim based on ‘ability to pay’. In this context, fundamental issues are being raised about the role of the state in social provision in a ‘socialist market economy’ and about how to create new forms of harmonious, state–society synergies that will sustain the development projects of these two countries.
