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As China has surfaced as an economic giant in the context of globalization, how this post-socialist country will adjust itself to a profoundly-changed society and strategically respond to the growing social tensions and diverse needs remains appealing. In the advanced industrialized democracies, social policy is widely adopted by government to address social issues, such as poverty, health inequality, ageing, unemployment and housing shortage. In China, social policy didn’t exist as an independent policy arena in the period of planned economy. The economic reform and openness started in the late 1970s created massive impact on social fabric and the trajectories of social welfare and social protection development. As the process of market economy and social transition was accelerated, China has encountered a series of daunting challenge in keeping balance between economic growth and social stability. Although economic growth was seemingly kept as a rare primary source of maintaining its institutional legacy, persistent rural poverty and income gap, rural migrants and conflicting cadre-civilian relations, imbalanced health services, soaring educational inequality, declining fertility and rapid population ageing in an absence of integrative workable pension system have made the contour of modernizing its social security system unforeseeable in the context of slowing-down economy.

The past decade witnessed an apparent progress of social policy intervention, however, institutional constraints and contained effects in the domain of social policy has ostensibly marked China’s ‘soft power deficit as a deeper problem. In October, 2017, President Xi declared that China has smoothly moved toward a new era of building socialism with Chinese characteristics at the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC). Among its sobering missions of the Party, continuously raising its state capacity of meeting the escalating social expectation of improving the quality of life has become a focal point of social policy intervention in the forthcoming years and beyond. Within the 13^th Five Year Plan (2016-2020), China will achieve its goal of creating a better-off society and substantially increase the income level for all citizens in the country. Before that, winning the war on poverty reduction in the country is a must to fulfill its goal. And how can the government re-adapt itself to a new challenging environment of a turbulent global economy and address social problems in shifting state-society relations is also desirable. The year of 2021 will be crucial both for the Party and the country because it will witness the centennial founding ceremony of the Communist Party of China and the beginning of the 14^th Five-year Plan (2021-2025).

Social policy is somehow a by-product of economic growth that can be used as a rational instrument to solve social problems and maintain social order. However, with progress of human civilization, social policy is becoming a unique domain of socio-economic and political institutions in the industrialized societies. Currently, economic growth and social development is considered as an integrative part of national and international development agenda, which requires government, civil society, community and citizens to work closely to seek better solutions to generate new drives for economic growth and create more opportunities of reducing social inequality in a flux of change. Therefore, social policy has gone beyond the traditional scope of simply providing a safety net for all and sustaining full employment. Rather, social policy can play a crucial role in an innovative way to keep balance of economic growth and social stability by increasing the efficiency of public finance through a better redistribution mechanism of resources, income and opportunities. Especially, social policy can effectively improve the long-term situations of socio-economic development by guaranteeing an equal access to education and health services for everyone in the society. In a new era, China is moving positively toward this direction.

How social policy was made in Chinese society? How was social policy designed as to achieve its goals of government in its political agenda? In what ways do state-society relations influence the policy-making and implementation in the changeable context? This course is mainly designed to meet academic interests of undergraduate and postgraduate-level students and the professionals who are willing to embark an intellectual journey with the course lecturer in probing and examining the complex relationship between social issues and social policy responses in contemporary China.