Asia at the Crossroads: Solidarity through Scholarship

Description

Revisiting the ‘East Asian Welfare Model’ Roundtable

This roundtable invites discussants to re-examine the validity and ongoing relevance of the 'East Asian Welfare Model' given the new and changing realities of 21st Century East Asia. Key discussants will reflect not only on the continuing relevance of the model to Singapore, Korea, Taiwan, Japan, and other East Asian contexts, but also on whether it can be applied to the case of China.

The academic discussion around the East Asian Welfare Model is well-established, and has largely been preoccupied with identifying its features (e.g. Goodman et al., 1998; Aspalter 2006), such as productivism (Holliday, 2000), developmentalism (Tang, 2000), or Confucianism (Walker and Wong, 2005). The validity of the Model has been questioned, given the distinctive social policy characteristics, and the processes of democratization and globalization of some of the countries compounded in it. Moreover, China, a country not originally included in the Model, has undergone rapid economic growth and major systemic change, prompting a spate of welfare reforms. Whether China fits into the East Asian Welfare Model remains an open question.

The following key speakers were invited to this roundtable and will have ten minutes to give their reflections on the theme:

Professor Ka Ho Mok : education and social policy in East Asia and the Greater China region.
Professor Bingqin Li : comparative social policy between Asia and the West.
Professor Jude Howell, a political scientist expert on China’s development and state-society relations, chaired the session.
Professor Jie Lei, from Sun Yat-sen University, China, joined the discussion.

Period	3 Sep 2020
Event type	Conference
Location	Kobe, Japan
Degree of Recognition	International