Welfare Practice: The Period of 1840–1949

Abstract

This chapter describes rural welfare between the Opium Wars and the creation of PRC. It is a period of a gradual shift from an idea of welfare centred on traditional values to the emergence of a modern conception of welfare. Various trials from different groups for improving peasants’ living standards and the structure of the countryside. Foreign charitable organizations entered China and established charity institutes and Chinese scholars returned from overseas, bringing new ideas and looking for solutions to social problems. Several influential Chinese intellectuals took part in the rural construction in the belief that grassroots rural movements. The CPC under Mao led peasants to carry out a revolution that overthrew the landlord class and abolished the thousand-year long feudal land system. This revolution not only solved the land problem but the root cause of rural inequality and social misery was also destroyed.