Unemployment and Social Citizenship within Chinese and Nordic Social Policy

China is taking quick strides into the art of conducting social policy within a market based economy. Social policies towards unemployment that might warrant comparative research have been in place for some time, but are also under continuous development. The Nordic welfare states, on the other hand, have been engaging unemployment for some time, but these are by no means frozen landscapes either. Unemployment potentially entails a range of negative consequences for the individual such as marginalization across a range of societal arenas that can also be described as a loss of social citizenship. Social policy towards the unemployed can attempt to alleviate this and secure the equal social citizenship of the unemployed.

What does the social citizenship of the unemployed look like when we compare the policies and social outcomes in two Chinese provinces and the two different Nordic countries of Denmark and Finland? The Nordic countries are often perceived as basing their policies on these aims of social citizenship, but such assumptions will be put into perspective. Furthermore, the aim is also to investigate whether a distinctly Chinese vision of social citizenship can be described based on tacit understandings of desirable social outcomes such as we might perhaps find in Confucian normative ideas of society, and how this fares in relation to current policies and outcomes.