Looking east: (Re-)creating a social work ‘industry’ in the People’s Republic of China

Introduction

Almost eighty contributions from the Peoples’ Republic of China (PRC) were listed to appear at the prestigious world conference on Social Work, Education and Social Development, in Dublin, during the summer of 2018. Forty years after the ‘reform and opening’ (gaige kaifang) of the PRC in 1978, the number of presentations is indicative of the rapid (re-)emergence of Chinese social work and its firm foothold within the global social work community. More provocatively, Gray (2008: 401) argues that the PRC now appears to present an ‘ideal opportunity for social work’s territorialising machine’. Such a dynamic is detectable, for example, in the efforts by US-based social work educators and practitioners to take ‘New York social work savvy to Beijing’ (Stoelker, 2016). It was, in fact, an American missionary, John Stewart Burgess (1883–1949), who introduced social work to China at the beginning of the 20th century (Meng et al., 2017: 2). In 1917, he set up the Student Social Service Club and, five years later whilst teaching at Yenching University, he helped to inaugurate a training programme modelled on those prevalent in the USA. In this sense, the beginning of social work training in China can be viewed as an example of social policy ‘transfer’ inspired by a foreign power. Prior to the inauguration of the PRC in the late-1940s, ‘eight universities in China provided social work programmes’ (Leung and Xu, 2015: 153). However, both social work and sociology were extinguished in the early 1950s, because they were categorised as examples of ‘bourgeois pseudo-science’ (in Meng et al., 2017: 2).

In more recent times, the political and social policy project to promote social work has been analytically inseparable from the ‘big picture of social governance’ (Wang, 2015: 79) and thorough examination cannot be solely confined to policies in one discrete, separable field of social intervention. The modest aspiration of this article, therefore, is to dwell on why may social work have emerged in the PRC since the 1980s and, much more emphatically, since 2006. Why have policy makers in the PRC, a country in which social work was starkly absent for decades, felt the need to develop the profession again? What does this move reveal about the wider economic and social context in which social work is situated in the PRC? What are the structures of governance which are, seemingly, now conducive to social work? ¹

The article draws on, distils and synthesises an expansive range of literature – mostly derived from Chinese and South-East Asian scholarship – located within and outside social work and social policy. First, drawing on the theorisation of Antonio Gramsci and his notion of the ‘passive revolution’, it charts how capitalism has been incrementally restored to the PRC since the late 1970s (Morton, 2007). Clearly, this an immense area of analysis and comment and the relevant dimensions can only be addressed in radically truncated form. However, if we are to begin to understand the ‘speeding up of the development of social work’ (Wang, 2015: 79), it is important to acknowledge the CPC’s decisive turn in 1978. Second, again making use of the theorisation of Gramsci, it is argued that – in examining developments in the PRC over the past two decades – the concept of hegemony provides a potentially useful foundation for exploring the notion of the ‘harmonious society’. This concept began to be articulated by the leadership of the CPC in 2002 and was presented, in more rounded form, in 2006. In the next part of the article, it is maintained that, despite many regional variations, it may still be possible to identify the emerging contours of a social work with distinctive Chinese traits.

‘Passive revolution’: The restoration of capitalism in the PRC

In 1949 the Chinese Revolution toppled the ‘three mountains of imperialism, feudalism, and bureaucrat-capitalism’ (Xi, 2017: 12). Whilst not seeking to impose a ‘golden age’ narrative on the ensuing years, this was clearly an extraordinary achievement and the Maoist period (1949–78) produced tangible gains for the people (renmin). In 1950, for example, life expectancy was around 35, but by 1982 it had increased to 68 (Leung and Xu, 2015: 20).

The historic Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee of the CPC, convened in December 1978, signalled the beginning of the ‘reform’ era (Sigley, 2009). Despite never holding office as either General Secretary of the CPC or President of the PRC, Deng Xiaoping, was the figure largely responsible for steering through the market ‘reform’ agenda. This shift did not imply the end of planning or state intervention and it was accompanied by the continuing authoritarian management of civil society as reflected in the unevenly enforced biopolitical ‘one child policy’ which was officially endorsed in 1980 (Kipnis, 2007: 338). The 1980s also witnessed the state’s elimination of the world’s first contemporary ‘Occupy’ movement the – politically ambiguous – Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.

Developments, since 1978, might be conceptualised as a ‘passive revolution’ (Hui, 2017). Derived from the theorisation of Gramsci, this phrase refers to a situation in which a ruling group lacks sufficient hegemonic power – both coercive and cultural – to unequivocally impose a capitalist political, economic and social programme. Whilst failing to engage with and win over the majority of the population, it aims to ensure the cooperation and acquiescence of potentially significant antagonistic groups. This is done by means of incorporating and absorbing them into the organs of the state, key ideological apparatuses and associated elite networks. Such a strategy, whilst not founded upon popular and mass support of the people, can still result in substantial and far-reaching change – indeed, a ‘passive revolution’ or ‘top-down’ revolution can occur (Hoare and Nowell Smith, 2005). As Gramsci noted, this can also often be perceived as a period when the ruling class is no longer able to lead, only to dominate, by ‘exercising coercive force alone’. It also illuminates the appearance of a ‘crisis’ in so far as the ‘old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear’ (in Hoare and Nowell Smith, 2005, pp. 275–276). In the PRC, such ‘symptoms’ include – as discussed later – the suicides of migrant workers and the plight of the children ‘left-behind’ on account of their parents being compelled to leave the countryside to find work in the cities (China Daily, 2017).

The ‘reforms’ have, in fact, ‘triggered a series of profound social problems, such as inequality, unemployment and “floating populations” in large cities’ (Ying, 2013: 1591). Migrant workers (Mingong chao) constitute the bulk of this ‘floating population’ and they swell the number of workers in the rapidly urban areas. Migrant labour is not – as may be often assumed – limited to factory work, since many white collar workers, including social workers, fall into this category. These workers’ presence in the cities is generated by the decollectivisation of agriculture and the need for proletarian labour. This is especially the case in the construction and micro-electronics assembly plants. In terms of the former sector, the Chinese construction industry has been ‘consuming half the world’s concrete and a third of its steel and employs about 60 million people, most of them rural workers coming from all over the country’ (Pun, 2016: 42). The company which has achieved prominent notoriety in the latter sector is the Hon Hai Precision Industry Company founded in Taipei, the capital of Taiwan, in 1974. It is better known as ‘Foxconn’ – an abbreviation alluding to the corporation’s renown for producing electronic connectors at quick and agile fox-like speed. Multinational corporations availing of Foxconn services include renowned brands such as Amazon, Apple and Microsoft (Pun et al., 2016). In short, a grim rollcall of global capitalism’s hip and ‘cool’ corporations (McGuigan, 2009).

Foxconn has industrial plants in a number of countries, but the PRC is home to more of its factories than any other country. The largest of these is located in Shenzhen, where hundreds of thousands of workers – including the company’s own social workers – are employed on a campus often referred to Foxconn City. The working – and living – conditions of these workers has been the source of longstanding concerns (Pun and Koo, 2015). For example, the company has been criticised for: the length of employees’ working-day; the pace and robotic character of the work undertaken; the way that workers are treated (not, for instance, being able to talk to each other); the recruitment and deployment, as part of so-called mandatory ‘internship’ programmes, of school students as ‘cheap labour’ (Smith and Chan, 2015); the use of crowded migrant dormitories which also serve to blur the boundaries between home and work. Intensified forms of exploitation and value extraction have unsurprisingly generated various types of worker protest. In 2010, 18 young migrant workers attempted suicide at Foxconn production facilities (Pun, 2016: 57). In January 2012, on Foxconn’s Wuhan campus, over ‘one hundred workers protested on the roof of a three-story building, threatening to commit mass suicide’ (Pun and Koo, 2015: 414). Later that year, 5,000 armed policy were dispatched to respond to a riot by thousands of workers at the Foxconn factory in the northern Chinese city of Taiyuan (Beech, 2012).

In the 1980s and 1990s, it was primarily young women who were perceived as the ideal workers to undertake this form of assembly work. Now the second generation of migrant workers is more gender-balanced. Young migrant workers, interviewed by Pun and Koo (2015: 413), were also keen to possess the ‘cutting-edge networking gadgets they produced, such as iPhones and iPads, so that they could be connected to urban modernity’. Many of these workers were likely to have been lured to the various Foxconn factories because wages are often relatively higher than the local market norms. In the 19th century, Marx (1990: 784) wrote about a similar category of workers who constituted a ‘disposable industrial reserve army’, a ‘mass of human material always ready for exploitation’. According to Marx, these workers became the ‘lever of capitalist accumulation’ and a ‘condition of the existence of the capitalist mode of production’. What he termed the ‘latent’ element of this ‘surplus population of workers’ was sourced from the countryside. Today, in the PRC, workers based in the countryside are likewise ‘called upon to work in the city but not to stay in the city’ (Pun, 2016: 67). The rural–urban divide is administered and surveilled via the hukou system – a household registration scheme – introduced 1958 and resembling an internal passport scheme (Wang and Liu, 2016). Many urban workers, including many social workers and social work students, hold rural household hukou permits and so their presence in the city is often ‘contingent and precarious’ (Cho, 2013: 14).

Economic ‘reforms’ have boosted, according to one social work-related contribution, ‘China’s socioeconomic development’ with the resulting seismic changes having ‘considerably improved … people’s living standards’ (Meng et al., 2017: 6). Based on the World Bank threshold of $1.25 a day, the poverty rate dropped from 84% in 1980 to 10% in 2013 (in Leung and Xu, 2015: 2). However, the Human Development Index compiled by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) still ranks the PRC only at 86 out of the 189 countries assessed (UNDP, 2018). ‘Big picture’ representations, such as those amplified by Meng et al. (2017), also risk inadvertently obscuring the fact that the development strategy in the PRC manifestly accords ‘priority to the development of a certain section of the population and certain regions’ (Pun, 2016: 15). The scale of economic inequality is striking in that 1% of population owns 42% of the wealth. In 2012, the average income of the top 20% was 20 times that of the bottom 20% (Leung and Xu, 2015: 57). Although continuing to profess an adherence to Marxism, the PRC is willing to tolerate – even to nurture – extreme inequalities. For example, the Shenzhen-based real estate developer, Hui Ka Yan, is reported to have a net worth of $42.5 billion (Flannery, 2017). Aside from a super-rich class, an ‘emergent, fragmented, and amorphous’ middle-class has evolved, in cities such as Shanghai, which has been empowered to purchase homes in ‘gated communities’ and to send their children to private schools (Woronov, 2009). Each day, often under the watchful eyes of attentive and armed security personnel, such children are shepherded onto and off new, shiny yellow school buses.

By 2005, according to official pronouncements in the PRC, the formerly state-planned economy had been superseded by a ‘socialist market economy’ (in Hui, 2017: 73). Nevertheless, it is apparent that this process has been steered by a ‘fledging capitalist class’ (Hui, 2017: 73). Eradicated in the years following the foundation of the state in 1949, this class is, suggests Elaine Sio-ieng Hui (2017), comprised of three core elements. First, foreign corporations which became situated in the PRC after the inauguration of Special Economic Zones (SEZs), starting with Shenzhen, the ‘holy place of China’s economic reform’, from 1979 onwards (Cho, 2017: 275). The injection of foreign capital in these areas is illuminated by the presence of Walmart littering the Chinese landscape with almost 450 retail units over 189 cities. Second, a tier constituted by ‘cadre-turned capitalists’ who profited after state owned enterprises (SOEs) were ‘corporatised or sold to private entrepreneurs in the mid-1990s’ (Hui, 2017: 17). Third, although still publically owned, reshaped SOEs function as ‘key market actors’ in vital sectors such as telecommunications and banking (Hui, 2017: 73).

During the period when Jiang Zemin was General Secretary of the CPC (1989–2002) and President of the PRC (1993–2003) capitalist restoration policies became more pronounced and stridently energised. Capitalists were permitted to join the CPC and, by 2014, ‘close to one-third of the super-rich in the country’ were members (Hui, 2017: 73–74). Eighty-six billionaires were members of the National People’s Congress and 69 billionaires were members of the People’s Political Consultative Conference. In this sense, the CPC apparatus and capitalist elites have seemingly fused into one ‘historical bloc’, whose ‘passive revolution’ is bent on eradicating the economic order established in 1949 (Hoare and Nowell Smith, 2005). Relatedly, the PRC has been subject to starkly uneven development with economic resources being ‘disproportionately allocated’ to showcase cities, most prominently Shanghai, and other coastal cities (Gray, 2010). Meanwhile, inland provinces have lagged behind. This development has been illuminated in Mun Young Cho’s (2013: 3) ethnographically rich depiction of the north-east where ‘old manufacturing cities, once a socialist industrial base, have become a moribund rustbelt …at the moment when their country is being heralded as the world’s emerging superpower’. Public discourses now ‘mock northeasterners for their radical shift from being the “sons of the Republic” to ignorant dropouts’ because they are not ‘successful’ (chenggong) (Cho, 2013: 29).

The working class and peasants have been deprived of a range of material and social gains since the ‘reforms’ of 1978. Urban work units (danwei) and rural communes (renmin gongshe), which also provided forms of solidarity and social assistance, were replaced by market-driven arrangements whereby workers were forced to sell their labour power (Hui, 2016). The loss of the so-called ‘iron rice bowl’ – the commitment of the government and the CPC to provide secure employment and a steady income – was indicative of the offensive aimed at workers located in state owned enterprises (SOEs) (Cho, 2013; Chaohua, 2015). Over 30 years, ‘an entire generation – or two – of China’s industrial working class was made victim to the reform process. For them, the net effect was no better than that of “shock therapy” in Russia’ (Chaohua, 2015: 31–32). This development seems, moreover, to typify what Harvey (2005) refers to as capital ‘accumulation by dispossession’. Beginning in the late 1990s, a host of sectors directly ‘linked to the quality of life of the common people – housing, health care, education, etc. – basically became marketized’ (Pun, 2016: 14). Today, it ‘costs money to send a child to school, it costs money when an older person gets ill – the financial burden on the individual family has increased dramatically’ (Pun, 2016: 24–25).

With the foundation of the PRC in 1949, private property was outlawed. However, beginning in 1979, urban residents – foreshadowing the policies of the UK administration of Thatcher – were encouraged to purchase their work unit located homes, at greatly reduced prices’ (Cho, 2013: 51). Within newly configured workplaces, neoliberal ‘contract’ schemes and other forms of precarious working were introduced. Mass dismissals also resulted with lay-offs amounting to ‘more than 20 million in the 1990s’ (Chaohua, 2015: 31–32). Indeed, market mechanisms generated a massive swathe of what are euphemistically referred to as ‘off-post’ (xiagang) workers.

By 1982 the ‘right to strike’ contained in earlier PRC constitutions had been removed as ‘ultra-leftist’ (White, 2013: 799). Still, strikes and industrial unrest continue to take place with restructuring leading to more than ‘three thousand worker strikes and protests every year in the late 1990s and early 2000s’ (Cho, 2013: 28). Protests sparked by land expropriation, house demolitions and the despoliation of the environment have also taken place, but strikes and related disruptions failed to coalesce into a mass opposition movement (Gray, 2010). Indicative of the conceptual purchase of the ‘passive revolution’ conceptualisation, the world’s largest trade union organisation – the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) – has been largely incorporated within the mechanisms of the Chinese state and has been rendered largely compliant and unwilling to destabilise the ‘reform’ programme introduced in 1978 (Hui, 2016).

In what follows, utilising the theorisation of Gramsci, it is maintained that the concept of hegemony aids an understanding of how the notion of the ‘harmonious society’, so central to the (re-)creation of social work in the PRC, can be interpreted and understood. Contentiously, according to Leung and Xu (2015), this concept and the social policy shifts associated with it are substantial and represent a ‘third’ rupture following the those prompted by the establishment of the PRC (in 1949) and ‘reform and opening’ (in 1978).

A new hegemonic project: Assembling the ‘harmonious society’

Hegemonic power should not be misleadingly interpreted as the antithesis of domination or outright coercive intervention. Rather, as Gramsci avows, ‘the supremacy of a social group manifests itself in two ways, as ‘domination’ and as ‘intellectual and moral leadership’ (Gramsci in Hoare and Nowell Smith, 2005: 57, emphasis added). For a hegemonic project to be successful, therefore, it has to address people’s lived experience of the world. Thus, a dominant class has to organise, persuade and maintain the consent of the subjugated by ensuring that its own ideas constitute the core perceptions and ‘common sense’ within a particular nation and social formation (Crehan, 2011). Stark inequalities present particular challenges to the hegemony of the CPC because, for much of the population, it was not meant to be this way. That is to say, whereas ‘most ghetto residents in the United States or slum dwellers in India have been mired in poverty throughout their lives … impoverished workers in China’s shantytowns were once “the people” serving as both ideological representatives and the main beneficiaries of the socialist regime’ (Cho, 2013: 59–60).

In terms of leading and managing the population, the PRC is a social formation in which the CPC leadership – since 1949 – has appeared particularly attuned to the political and cultural importance of ‘keywords’ and it has aspired to lexicalise hegemonic power (Williams, 1983; Garrett, 2018a). In the early years of the state, in fact, many leading cadre had professional backgrounds in publishing and editing and a series of struggles took place concerning particular words to include or exclude from officially produced dictionaries (Lee, 2014). During the period of Mao, for example, sustained battles were waged aimed at omitting words deemed too ‘pessimistic’ (Lee, 2014: 432). In 2018, the government, sensitive to criticisms directed at new powers accorded to Xi Jinping, censored a range of ‘sensitive’ words used on social media (China Digital Times, 2018).

Over the last two decades, the CPC has ‘retained its commitment to the Dengist core idea of integrating China gradually, but ever more fully into global capitalist networks of production and exchange by entrenching market institutions’ (Mulvad, 2017: 29). However, Hu Jintao (General Secretary of the CPC from 2002 to 2012 and President of the PRC from 2003 to 2012) adopted a somewhat different approach to that of the so-called ‘Shanghai Gang’ whose political dominance was symbolised by Jiang Zemin (Gray, 2010: 462). ‘The Chinese working class has a history of radical politics … Because of this, a fear of harmful reactions against the government is a constant undercurrent’ (Yang, 2015: 3). Both leaders were, therefore, attentive to the threat of revolt – especially from a potentially antagonistic working class – and both administrations adopted tactics and strategies to try and ward this off. Put rather schematically, the period 1978–2002/3 was one of ‘passive revolution’ and the subsequent period has been one of capitalist ‘hegemony’ with the CPC-state seeking to further embed the new economic and social relations following dramatic shifts which took place in the final quarter of the century.

The Hu Jintao leadership ‘shifted to a “softer” variant of Dengism with more emphasis on retaining social stability’ (Mulvad, 2017: 29). It aimed to ‘present itself as being more focused on the plight of those left behind in China’s prosperity, on clean and transparent government and the rooting out of corruption, and on the rule of law’ (Gray, 2010: 12). A fresh emphasis was placed on greater social inclusiveness and more ameliorative social policies (Leung and Xu, 2015). This move was also likely to have been triggered by the marked escalation in labour disputes and ‘mass incidents’ (the official term for protests, strikes and demonstrations) (Hui and Chan, 2011: 160). This turbulence provided part of the context for the conceptualisation and amplification of the more conciliatory and upbeat ‘harmonious society’ motif. The concept – inextricably linked to the (re-)creation of social work – was initially raised at the 16th CPC Congress, held in November 2002. Subsequently, it was defined by the CPC Central Committee 4th plenary session of September 2004 as a society building on ‘democracy and rule of law, justice and equality, trust and truthfulness, amity and vitality, order and stability, and a harmonious relation with nature’ (in Hui and Chan, 2011: 160). In early 2005, Hu Jintao asserted that the ‘harmonious society’ was integral to a politics intent on ‘consolidating the party’s social foundation to govern’ and achieve its historical ‘mission’ (in Hui and Chan, 2011: 161). In this way, in Gramscian terms, the CPC viewed this construct as essential component of its hegemonic project to furnish intellectual and ‘ethical’ leadership.

Thus, in recent years, the rhetorical emphasis has been placed on social stability and harmony (shehui wending he hexie) and such notions have been deployed to suggest that the PRC had abandoned the strategy of uncontrolled growth and its associated abyssal social and economic inequalities. In this sense, it was implied that the brake was being applied to halt reckless and destabilising processes of capital accumulation. Significantly, seeking to reach into the ‘lifeworld’ of the people, policy debates circulating around the ‘harmonious society’ have also been historically grounded in Confucian values stressing ‘social stability and order over conflict, collective over individual interests, obedience to authority, family obligations, a work ethic, and the importance of education’ (Leung and Xu, 2015: 10).

Hegemony is not, however, simply achieved via a series of discursive interventions undergirded by the constant threat of coercive state measures against insurgent tendencies. That is to say, actual material concessions also need to be made. For example, since the late-1990s, a Minimum Livelihood Guarantee – colloquially known as dibao – has been the main response to poverty. Originating in Shanghai in 1993, the assessment criteria is complex and it is percolated, perhaps like systems of income maintenance elsewhere, by culturally embedded ideas about the ‘deserving’/’undeserving’ (Li and Walker, 2017). Mockery of those ‘who “eat on dibao” (chi dibao) without actively searching for a new job runs through media accounts’ (Cho, 2013: 89). Similarly, terms such as “dibao sluggards” (dibao lanhan) or “dibaoniks” (dibao zu) are frequently used to denigrate “lazy” people who are supposedly satisfied with dibao and thus reluctant to look for work’ (Cho, 2013: 89).

Migrant workers were granted more legal protection and minimum wage increases occurred in some regions. Significant new laws governing industrial relations and contracts were also introduced in 2007 (Hui and Chan, 2011). Strikingly, despite the promulgation of this rhetorically recalibrated model of development, income inequality and the wealth gap have not been adequately dealt with by the state (Statista, 2018).

Since Xi Jinping became the General Secretary of the CPC and President of the PRC – in 2012 and 2013 respectively – there do not seem to have been any substantial social policy departures from the ‘harmonious society’ theme articulated by Hu Jintao and his ruling circle. Throughout the ‘reform’ era, though, Chinese leaders have continued to search for a ‘new ideological justification for their leadership’ (Lee, 2014: 435). With the current leadership, a much more nationalistic strand – reflected in the aspiration to achieve the ‘Chinese Dream (zhongguo m eng) of national rejuvenation’ – is to the fore (Xi, 2017: 1). This ‘vision’ aims to encourage the ‘release of positive energy and efforts to mobilize people to identify with and fulfill state interests’ (Yang, 2015: 9). According to some commentators, the whole idea of ‘national development’ seems to have entirely usurped ‘proletarian dictatorship’ and ‘revolution’ as the most ‘powerful signifier’ in the PRC (Cho, 2013: 34). Indeed, it has been suggested that today ‘nationalism is the only effective ideological force consolidating people’s identification with the state’ (Laikwan, 2017: 7).

Given this structural and political context, what type of social work is presently being constituted in the PRC?

The ‘harmonious society’ and a new ‘spring of social work’

The social sciences were re-established in the late 1970s and, by the end of the following decade, social work programmes had been put in place at a small number of universities (Leung and Xu, 2015). The ‘cornerstone’ of social work’s (re-)creation in the PRC was laid in September 1987 when the Ministry of Civil Affairs (MCA) invited a group of, largely sociology, scholars from different universities to attend a forum in Beijing (Gao and Yan, 2015: 94). In 1991 the China Association of Social Work was founded (and subsequently joined the International Federation of Social Workers) and the China Association for Social Work Education (now a member of the International Association of Schools of Social Work) was established three years later. Arguably, even into the 1990s, though, the government ‘endorsement’ of the profession appears to have been rather lukewarm (Leung and Xu, 2015: 154). A new ‘spring of social work’ (Leung, 2012: 338) blossomed in 2006 as the ‘harmonious society’ hegemonic project began to become embedded in political and social policy discourses.

According to the Director of the Office of Social Work at the MCA, since the pivotal year of 2006, the CPC has assessed the ‘timing and situation to strategically plan for building the enormous team of social work personnel, according to the macro framework of constructing a Socialist harmonious society’ (Wang, 2015: 78). A licensing system has been in place since 2008, and, in 2010, it was predicted that there would be a need for 2 million social workers by 2015 and 3 million by 2020. In 2012 this was revised to 0.5 million and 1.5 million respectively (Leung and Xu, 2015: 157). Still, even this revised numbers would considerably swell – and proportionately enhance the Chinese constituent part of – the global social work community; in the USA, for example, there are only currently approximately 850,000 social workers (DATAUSA, 2018). By 2020, there will be 500 social work schools in the PRC (Leung and Xu, 2015: 158). As Leung and Xu (2015: 157) note, it seems that ‘no other country in the world has such a comprehensive and long term plan for the development of its social work profession’.

Recent reports indicate that more than 1 million individuals have received social work training over the past decade, and 312,000 people were employed as social workers by the end of 2017 (Niu and Haugen, 2018). However, Social Work Organisations (SWOs) are largely concentrated in the coastal provinces of Guangdong, Shanghai, Zhejiang, Jiangsu and Beijing (Leung and Xu, 2015: 161). Despite the manifest political and policy aspirations to ‘grow’ the profession, the number of social workers is relatively meagre given the population size of the PRC (Gray, 2008). The development of services is also strikingly uneven with, a few years ago, almost 12,000 registered social workers in Beijing but only two in Tibet and 184 in Ningxia (Leung and Xu, 2015: 161).

As in a number of other countries, social work is mostly carried out by women. In Guangdong, for example, 70% of social workers have been reported to be female (in Cho, 2017: 282). Running counter to perceptions that the PRC is a highly centralised state, the government encourages local approaches when trying to develop national policy on social work’s evolution (Gao and Yan, 2015). For example, in Shanghai, several ‘NGOs were established there in the mid-1990s to provide community-based welfare service. Pilot social work stations were created in schools, hospitals and neighbourhoods. In 2003, three NGOs were set up by the government to deliver youth crime prevention services in the city’ (Leung and Xu, 2005: 155).

More generally, how is the current hegemonic order shaping the (re-)created profession? For critical social policy analysis, three dimensions, at least, may be significant and these relate to politics, the ‘community’ and the terms and conditions of work.

Conclusion

The PRC ‘will soon possess the most social workers in the world’ (Cheung, 2017: 109). Moreover, the profession may now be beginning to share some of the characteristics of Western social work – itself a heterogeneous bundle of practices (Garrett, 2014). However, it has been tentatively argued that three traits are, to differing degrees, significant. Namely, social workers appear to be: tasked to undertake politically shackled roles; marginalised within the ‘community’; lowly paid and subject to precarious working conditions.

Although there is clearly no neat ‘fit’, the (re-)creation of social work took place during the same few decades when a Chinese proletariat was (re-)created. Moreover, this article argued that the Gramscian concepts of ‘passive revolution’ and ‘hegemony’ potentially aid our understanding of the evolution of the PRC since the late-1970s and, especially since 2006, the (re-)creation of a social work ‘industry’ (Feng, 2013: 101). Whilst resisting a reductively mechanistic interpretation of social work’s evolution, it was suggested that the profession’s new centrality can be only be meaningfully comprehended if it is located within the wider hegemonic project pivoting on the CPC’s promulgation of the ‘harmonious society’.