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Make healthcare free, a basic universal job guarantee, decrease income/wealth inequality through taxes (which could reduce consumption by the top 10%) and spending targeted towards the bottom.

Healthcare access, affordability and quality is constantly and consistently improving for the average Chinese person and is comfortably better than any remotely comparable country in income/wealth per capita. People should understand that you cant magically get the left end of the income distribution in a middle income country to attain welfare outcomes of a high income socdems country’s middle class with redistribution policy. Its not neoliberalism to say that they will get there even under a socialist government by YoY progress relative to the rate of the country's development. China even now after all this absurd growth is still lagging the US or advanced European countries in GDP per capita (PPP or not) compared to how the USSR and other AES was positioned for most of the cold war. (40-60% for China vs 60-80% or above for the USSR in PPP terms). Even if China went full Soviet right now its welfare state redistributionary policies would be weaker for the average person compared to euro social democracies than the USSR's were compared to its contemporary social democracies.

Also fact is that Inequality in China HAS been consistently dropping for a decade+ now. Income inequality specificaly. And in China more so than in other countries inequality figures and changes ( as well as welfare access and quality) is a math problem driven by the rural-urban divide and rate of urbanisation. Inequality surged in the reform era as commercial opportunities exploded in urban China. The urban/rural income ratio was on a fast upward trend. As urbanization passed the 50% mark, China suppressed continued population growth in first-tier cities, pushing growth into second-and third-tier cities, thus evening out economic discrepancies between provinces. Since 2010, China’s Gini coefficient has been steadily falling. At around the same time, as the countryside emptied out, farm consolidation and mechanization resulted in rural incomes outgrowing urban incomes

During the GFC China was like was only 48% urbanized (versus 65% today). Would China have been better off focusing on building out a nordic level safety net? Did the neolib CPC not want better healthcare for the masses and instead for whatever reason diverted resources to corrupt and inefficient state-owned construction companies? Of course not, its obvious that urbanization and massive infastructure building would achieve much more bang for the buck regarding welfare outcomes given just how rural China still was than trying to build an advanced social safety net at like 6k GDP per capita. Urban disposable income was over three times rural levels in 2008. No amount of redistribution could ever give households more spending power and better welfare outcomes than focusing in turning rural workers into urban ones and upgrading infastructure in rural and urban areas alike. And again China’s 65% urbanization today is where Japan, the EU and South Korea were in 1962, 1973 and 1985, respectively. Still ways to go . The welfare outcome juice left in urbanization and investment and infasrtucture building is still where the most potential is. China diverted most of its capital to manufacturing and infrastructure rather than welfare programs over the last 10-15 years not because they didnt want better welfare outcomes for households for but because that was and is still the best way to achieve them. And no neither China nor any other country at a similar level of development had and has enough capital, money and labour to focus on both these redistributive approches at remotely to the same degree

Also over the past two decades, investment as a percentage of GDP has been far higher in inland provinces. Only one of the top ten fastest-growing provinces in the past decade (Fujian) has been coastal and none in the past two decades. So yeah if you’re in the 40-50% of China that is fully developed, the social safety net is on par with advanced nations. If you’re not, achieving modern social safety net merely a function of time regarding urbanization, development of lower tier cities and Houku reform and you are banking on current trajectories and the CPC getting you there. But it will happen in the controled way CPC has handled it till now. And to touch on that. Hukou reform, or lack thereof, is also a favorite hobby for China contrarians. With the huge gap in incomes and social services and nets between rural and urban china, if you just could go from a rural bumfuck town to Shanghai expecting access to all that it would have been a disaster for Chinese development. The costs of unregulated population concentration of hundreds of millions in megacities and the need for the walfare state to accomodate that in the span of 1-2 decades are rarely addressed. The hukou system has helped China avoid the slums that plague cities across the Global South. Everything you see in Brazil, Indonesia, India etc would have been an order of magnitude worse if there wasnt the oh so unfair and anti-socialist Hukou system in place. Through sequenced hukou reform, China has grown “medium-sized” cities – those with populations between 2 and 6 million – while keeping a lid on megacities with populations over 15 million.

So in making sense of Chinese "welfare" focus and policies you have to recognize that if you can get bigger increases in income and welfare outcomes by funding infrastructure and keeping shit cheap (forcufully price wise or with supply & productivity rump up) than with redistribution from a thin top layer of high income tax payers the former is the more efficient welfare policy choice and thats the position China has been and is still. Per capita production expansion does far more than focusing on social safety net redistribution at China’s development level. Welfare redistribution can ease some hardships but it won’t integrate poorer regions and lower classes of a billion people into productive economic activity and high standards of living and ultimately you cannot support consumption of what you don’t make. If the pie isn’t big enough splitting it creatively won’t fill everyone. The vast majority of the country that would most benefit from income and wealth transfers need transfers of production factors first, not transfers of consumption. So right now China is engaging in extensive redistribution from the rich to the poor. That redistribution comes in the form of state owned financial system taking capital gains from growth to try to build those production factors in the places where most low income people are. All the infastructure China has been purring money to without end in EVERY province and all the production and manufacturing power and "oversupply" keeping goods and services cheap IS redistributionary welfare policy, a much more effective one for China's strengths and levels of development at this point with much higher multipliers. It is the reason the average Chinese has seen their welfare get better much more so than any worker in any developing country. Its one of the more pro-social redistributive-oriented economic regimes the world has seen. Its pre-distributional vs post-distributional welfare economics. In simple terms its capex socialism.

HSR alone for example is one of the biggest walfare projects of modern times in the world. Chinese people at this point have access to travel of any length more expansively AND affordably than pretty much any other population in countries of any significant size. Distributed urban development (that evens out welfare outcomes) through HSR buildout is a complete re-engineering of physical China on a level that makes economistic arguments irrelevant.

What ppl looking for lessons on socialist construction, especially in developing countries should take away from China is that the government can intervene in a variety of ways to ensure goods and services stay cheap and to equalize welfare outcomes and not necessary to rely mostly on welfare payments and transfers and in fact depending on a country's strengths and level of development its not even the right choice. Prioritizing money & tax redistribution only makes sense when you have a rich and large enough middle and upper class relative to the rest of the population. And even still direct welfare spending HAS increased over the last decade as a % of GDP in almost every sector (education, healthcare). It pretty much doubled for healthcare and its now on the lower end of european countries. Who's to say that in 10-15 years China wouldnt overtake in healthcare spending european social democracies in their peak?

Graphs time