Prof. André Laliberté, PhD

Although ostensibly promoting secularism in their political order, states in contemporary Chinese societies have made considerable efforts to shape their religious landscape to serve a wide range of policy objectives. My research programme focuses on welfare policies, which face enormous challenges as these societies face the problem of ageing, and in the case of China, a skewed sex ratio at birth that favours boys over girls. Proposed solutions to address these demographic challenges, in the context of limited state provision of social services, rely on promoting ideologies that see the family as the ideal institution to care for elderly people. This major cultural shift, underway early in all Chinese societies, naturalises reliance on the family for elderly care to such an extent that analysts of East Asian welfare regimes have written about a Confucian welfare state, or welfare orientalism. 

In China, the increasingly overt state promotion of Confucianism as cultural heritage, contrasts with a century of campaigns to eliminate its influence. In Taiwan and Hong Kong, the official support to Confucianism, underway earlier, is more muted and subtle, and mediated through the promotion of popular beliefs as heritage. Adding to this complexity, in all Chinese societies, the state often relies on religious institutions to assist in the provision of social services to vulnerable populations that cannot benefit from family support, or whose marginal status in the market economy excludes them from the benefit of welfare regimes with an institutionalised bias towards the productive elements of society. Recent research shows the ways in which different models of welfare states in Western Europe owe their institutional shape to various forms of religious configurations. Recent scholarship has pursued this matter outside the Western world and looked at the complexity of relations between religious actors and states in the delivery of social services and the promotion of development. However, the literature on the evolution of welfare regimes in non-Western, post-socialist and post-colonial societies remains largely silent on the role of religion. My research programme seeks to amend this further by exploring societies influenced by Chinese traditions. The conceptual and terminological differences between Chinese and Western societies are not limited to the categories of religion (宗教zongjiao) and secularism (世俗shisu): this also affects the nature of social policy (社会政策shehui zhengce), the welfare state (福利国家fuli guojia), and philanthropy/charity (慈善cishan).