Unpacking and understanding the family as a collective socio-economic actor in China

This thesis aims to unpack and understand the role of family in China both as a welfare but primarily as an economic actor. It does so by exploring Chinese families’ familial strategies and practices on mobilising, accumulating, and coordinating household resources. To achieve this, it conducts an extensive analysis on the composition and distribution of family assets, income, expenditure, and debts among Chinese families, by using the data from China Family Panel Studies (CFPS).

The majority of the welfare state literature focuses on family as a welfare provider or at the end of state support. Fundamentally, this thesis explores the role of the family within the wider socio-economic conditions in China, as family, as an institution, is neither isolated nor reduced to welfare functions alone. This thesis conceptualises the family as a collective socio-economic actor by adopting the analytical framework developed by Papadopoulos and Roumpakis (2017; 2019). In doing so, the thesis contributes towards the empirical identification of the strategies that families use to mobilise, accumulate, and redistribute resources. The findings indicate that family remains a key socio-economic institution often underpinning financial transactions that can crowd out the role of banking and welfare institutions. The findings have important implications for understanding the role of family in China but equally for policymakers as they need to incorporate in their decisions the extensive role and trust that familial relationships carry to the Chinese society. Finally, the thesis highlights the need to locate and map familial strategies in the context of a developing welfare state in China and theoretically contributes towards the identification of family not merely as a welfare provider, as often assumed in comparative social policy literature, but as a cultural institution that underpins trustful and reciprocal relationships of support with direct implications even to the formal economy.