Emergence of social work practice in rural China: A way forward?

Abstract

Following massive socioeconomic reforms over the past three decades, social work in the People’s Republic of China (hereafter China) has developed at an unprecedented pace. To respond to social issues arising from accelerated economic development, the government has launched a large-scale programme to train a professional social work workforce of 1.45 million by 2020. Social work in mainland China has developed, and continues to develop, rapidly in major urban centres, while rural areas remain largely neglected. This article describes developmental issues in rural China and argues that social work requires indigenised knowledge and interventions to address context-specific problems.

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

“…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.…”

“…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.…”

“…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).…”

Baseline Survey of China Social Work Longitudinal Study 2019: Design and Implementation

“…In 2012, the MoCA launched the “Medium- and Long-term Plan for Social Work Professionals (2011–2020)” (hereafter, the Plan), which sets the aims that by the end of 2020, the number of trained or certificated social workers shall reach 1,450,000, and 80,000 nongovernmental social work agencies shall be established. In November 2012, a joint statement from the MoCA and the Ministry of Finance regulated that social work services should be provided by nongovernment, nonprofit organizations (Meng et al, 2018). At present, social work services have been delivered primarily by social work agencies that maintain service purchase contracts with the government (Cortis et al, 2018).…”