Is China heading toward a Welfare State? An analysis based on the health and education systems

Abstract This article presents a detailed description of the Chinese welfare system, focusing our analysis on the public healthcare and education systems. It scrutinizes the main reforms and the implemented programs and analyzes some of the results and the most significant problems in the period from 1980 to 2015. The healthcare and education systems are used as a proxy for the Chinese welfare system, since similar reforms have taken place in other areas, such as in the labor market and in pension schemes. We also make a qualitative comparison with the most important welfare typologies that are used in the literature to study Western countries and some selected East Asian states.