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ABSTRACT
This article explores the problems and challenges of the new economy for Chinese social policy. The rapid extension of a digital economy, an economy of artificial intelligence and e-shopping, may alter the configuration and basic functional pattern of social protection in China. Since the labour forces of various sectors are replaceable in the course of automation, traditional taxpayers and contributors to social insurance branches will decline in some highly automated sectors, causing sector-related dismissal and depleting the financial resources for social insurance in China. The phenomena of e-employment and e-commerce escape regulation by national tax and welfare regimes, leading to more employees being excluded from tangible social insurance benefits. Further, state revenues will keep decreasing in an epoch of thriving e-business since the tax evasion of e-employments is widely spread. Essentially, the legitimate basis of state-organized social policy will be shaken by the tide of the new economy. Against such backdrop, this article raises the new concept of ‘intangible welfare’, characterized by a high degree of fluidity and variability of investments, employment relationships, taxpayers and social insurance contributors. New forms of economy require new types of state regulation.
Acknowledgements
Special thanks go to the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments, which have helped to improve the text significantly.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. According to a report of by Financial Headlines (Caijing toutiao), approximately 450 million Chinese consumers have used the Alipay-system in 2016 (in Chinese: Zhifubao), a nationwide third-party payment platform created in 2004 in Hangzhou; download under http://cj.sina.com.cn/article/detail/3127391327/143991.
2. In Germany, some pioneering scholars from the University of Bremen have already touched upon this issue on the nexus between the digital economy and social policy (see Haunss & Nullmeier (Citation2016); for digitalization and labour market, see Eichhorst, Hinte, Rinne, & Tobsch (Citation2016) and Meike (Citation2016). Very few English literatures deal directly with this issue on the impact of digitalization on social protection and welfare states.
3. It is worth mentioning that some Chinese social policy scholars have noticed the problems of the decreasing extractive capacity of the Chinese state and its immense detriment to the state’s capacity for providing and organizing welfare in the 1990s (Wang, Citation2001; Liu, Citation2006; sections 18 and 19, pp. 172–206). However, this issue of diminishing extractive capacity by the state has only been linked to the diffusion of neoliberal ideology in the 1990s. Thus far, the nexus between the digital age and the state’s extractive capacity has not entered into the scope of academic research. For a discussion on the public financing of non-contributory social pensions, see also Liu and Sun (Citation2016) and Liu (Citation2017).
4. This holiday derived from the spontaneous celebration of singles in urban China. It was also known as ‘singles-day’ initially, and afterwards, it evolved into a day of online shopping for goods and commodities with deep discounts.
5. See the report by the Xinhua News Agency on 13 November 2017: download under http://szb.dlxww.com/dlrb/html/2017-11/13/content_1400726.htm?div=-1.
6. For the conception of the ethnoscape, see Appadurai (Citation1990); for the notion of ‘transnational social spaces’, see Pries (Citation1996).
7. See the report by the newspaper Beijing News on 06 March 2016 with the title, ‘More than 100 billion in tax evasion by e-commerce – proposed by Member of the National People’s Congress, Tian Wang’; download under http://tech.sina.com.cn/i/2013-03-06/02598116181.shtml.
8. The term C2C refers to the e-commercial exchange activities which take place between consumers and consumers.
9. The term B2C refers to the e-commercial exchange activities which take place between businesses and consumers.
10. See the report by People’s Daily on 24 April 2017 entitled, ‘The total volume of retail sales exceeded 5 trillion last year in China. How can the e-businessmen pay their taxes?’ Download under http://news.sdchina.com/show/4093898.html.
11. See the proposal by Tian Wang for a draft law on tax collection for e-commerce on 07 March 2013 provided by the China Electronic Commerce Research Institute; download under http://b2b.toocle.com/detail–6086810.html.
12. ibid.
13. ibid.
14. While the female group is generally less prone to Internet scams than the male group, women have lost more money than men.
15. See the report from the Beijing Daily (16 January 2016) with the title ‘The average internet fraud losses were 5106 Yuan in 2015, the sector of finance and money management suffers most’. This report has been proposed by the Hunting Network Platform (liewangpingtai); download under http://money.hexun.com/2016-01-16/181840458.html.
16. See the report by the Economic Daily (Jingji ribao) on 09 October 2016 with the title ‘The elderly people have become the most severely affected group of fraud: More than half of the old people didn’t tell their children out of the fear of complaints’; download under http://www.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_1539944.
17. See the discussion by the website Social Comments (shehui pinglun) ‘Why swindlers of health care products are fond of elderly people?’; download under http://star.news.sohu.com/20160330/n442784795.shtml.
18. Many of them come from Taiwan; see http://star.news.sohu.com/20160418/n444656949.shtml.
19. See the report by the Chinese Business Information Network on the Internet employment population nationwide and its provincial distribution on 21 December 2016; download under 2. http://www.askci.com/news/hlw/20161221/11220584043.shtml.
20. See the report by Workers’ Daily (01 March 2016) on the survey about the social protection of the internet employees; download under 3. http://ghpf.acftu.org/art/2016/3/1/art_1125_168554.html.
21. See the report by the Beijing Evening News on 28 March 2014; download under 4. http://news.163.com/14/0328/14/9OEBIEUU00014AED.html.
22. See the news of the National Business Daily (Meiri jingji xinwen) on 24 June 2014, download under 5. http://tech.sina.com.cn/it/2014-06-24/01369454483.shtml.
23. ibid.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Tao Liu
Tao Liu is a professor at the Institute of East Asian Studies and at the Institute for Sociology in the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany, and has published articles on accident insurance, social assistance, elderly care and old age social security in China.
Chao Wang
Chao Wang is a postdoc at the Institute of East Asian Studies, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany, and has published articles on gender equality, social policy, governance theory and reform practices in China.