Cultural & International

Join us to help celebrate Political Science professor & CEAPS Advisory Board member Yujeong Yang on her new book!

About the Speaker:
Yujeong Yang is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on welfare and labor politics in China, as well as the political and social implications of China’s global economic expansion. She is the author of Politics of Inclusion and Exclusion (Oxford University Press, 2025) and has published articles in the International Studies Quarterly, World Development, and Politics & Society.

About the Talk:
“The Politics of Inclusion and Exclusion: Pensions, Labor Informalization, and Labor Mobility in China”
Why and when do some authoritarian states develop welfare regimes that include workers in flexible and precarious employment positions, despite their limited economic or political leverage to challenge welfare exclusion? Politics of Inclusion and Exclusion investigates this question by examining locally divergent patterns of pension expansion in China. Yujeong Yang presents a theory arguing that a local state’s strategies for welfare inclusion or exclusion depend on its capacity to deny the citizenship membership of informal workers. Local states can exclude informal workers from welfare systems only when they can effectively retract or block informal workers’ access to social citizenship membership. Conversely, when local states are unable to deny such membership to informal workers, they are compelled to incorporate informal workers into public pension systems, albeit often with minimal benefits. Drawing on interviews, surveys, and anecdotal evidence, Yang further demonstrates how these locally varying welfare strategies shape Chinese individuals’ experiences of labor informality and their perceptions of the state as a welfare provider. Politics of Inclusion and Exclusion also extends these insights beyond China, offering a valuable framework for understanding the shifting dynamics of welfare politics in the context of growing labor informalization, the rise of the gig economy, and global migration.

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