I want to thank Yanzhong Huang for his thoughtful review of my book and Daniel O’Neill for the invitation to participate in this critical dialogue. In the review, Huang makes a good point that the reproduction and reinforcement of social inequalities in China that my book discusses may reflect the public’s preferences and choices, such as choosing urban large hospitals over nearby small primary care facilities for health care. As he knows, this involves a “policy feedback loop.” The stratified and inequitable expansion of Chinese social health insurance in the early 2000s placed social groups in different positions in terms of access to and capability to pay for health care depending on their sociopolitical status (i.e., hukou or household registration, employment sector and status). As a result, scarce health care resources—highly trained doctors, advanced medical devices and technology—become even scarcer for the non-elite groups, such as peasants, rural-to-urban migrants, and informal workers, which motivates them to go to urban large hospitals to obtain better medical services and treatments. Although the regime modified the hospital-centered health system to strengthen primary care facilities and capacities after 2012 when Xi Jinping took power, the public preferences, beliefs, and choices for health care shaped by the existing elite-oriented system still prevail and contribute to the reproduction and reinforcement of social inequalities. In this sense, the demand side needs to be better integrated into the current conceptual framework of social welfare in authoritarian regimes that usually focuses on the supply side (e.g., the regime leaders, bureaucracy).

In addition, the dominant supply-side theory of social welfare in authoritarian regimes is not sufficient yet to fully uncover the political dynamics of welfare policy in the context of China’s decentralized multilevel governance. Although my book emphasizes both the career-driven motivations and the local constraints for local leaders in realizing the regime’s promise of social welfare expansion, Huang points out a scenario of a “decentralized predatory state” at the county/city or lower levels, in which local social welfare provision is neither protective nor productivist but is diverted to maximize local leaders’ personal benefit. This scenario is theoretically different from the “status-quo type” localities my book identified in which local leaders keep social welfare provision minimalist due to fiscal stringency and low social risks. If a significant predatory state in social welfare was empirically established, it would be interesting for future research to examine whether the political economy explanation developed in my book can account for its existence and trend.

A lingering question about my book, as Huang rightly raises in the review, is whether the “stratified expansion” strategy of social welfare developed by the Hu Jintao administration in the early 2000s will persist or has been changed by Xi Jinping. On the one hand, there is considerable continuity of social welfare policy in Xi’s era. Many welfare reforms such as the urban–rural integration of social health insurance were initiated and locally piloted by the Hu administration and formalized nationally under Xi Jinping. On the other hand, the “common prosperity” Xi envisioned in his governance ideology seems to be pursued more through political and regulatory means than substantial social welfare and tax reforms. The outcomes and impacts of Xi’s distributive strategy will be unfolding and are worthy of scrutiny.