Social assistance and poverty reduction in China

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Notes

1. Yongsheng Mi is currently the Head of the Department of Minimum Living Security, Ministry of Civil Affairs, People's Republic of China.

2. The ‘Five Guarantees' program is a collective safety‐net catering mainly for the rural elderly without family caregivers and sources of income. Between 1956 and 1979, a number of regulations were issued by the central government, which defined the targets of the program as to include people ‘who are old, weak, single and disabled, unable to provide for themselves through labor and cannot avail the support of family members’. Rural collectives were required to provide them with a minimal level of food, clothing, shelter, medicine and funeral expenses, and take care of them either separately in their villages with both cash and in‐kind benefits or collectively in ‘Homes for the Aged’.