The contributors to this edited volume, covering a range of social issues ranging from family and aging to sexuality and culture and the arts, critically examine the relevance of social policy as it is understood in the West; and addresses the question of whether Singapore's response is unique.

In China, social development has fallen far behind economic development. This book looks at why this is the case, and poses the question of whether the conditions, structures and institutions that have locked China into unbalanced development are changing to pave the way for the next stage of development. Based on an empirical examination of ideological, structural and institutional transformations that have shaped China’s development experiences, the book analyses China’s reform and development in the social domain, including pension, healthcare, public housing, ethnic policy, and public expenditure on social programs. The book moves beyond descriptive analyses to understand the role of broader changes in shaping and redefining the pattern of development in China.

Social policy reforms driven by profound social changes have been a popular and pressing topic worldwide in recent years in both policy and academic circles. In this book, prominent social policy scholars from Europe, North America, and Asia discuss the history of social policies, compare different social development models, and analyze the challenges facing these economies' social policy reforms. The book provides comprehensive and comparative perspectives and updated data on social development and social policy reforms in the world's major economies, and particularly, in mainland China.

This book examines the relationship between population policies and individual reproductive decisions in low-fertility contexts. Using the case study of Singapore, it demonstrates that the effectiveness of population policy is a function of competing notions of citizenship, and the gap between seemingly neutral policy incentives and the perceived and experienced disparate effects. Drawing on a substantial number of personal interviews and focus groups, the book analyzes the developmental welfare state’s overarching emphasis of citizen responsibility, and examines population policies that reinforce social inequalities and ignore cultural diversity. These factors combine to undermine elaborate state policy efforts in encouraging citizens’ biological reproduction. The book goes on to argue that in order to facilitate positive fertility decisions, the state needs to modify the “economic production at all cost” approach and pay much more attention to the importance of social rights. This suggests that the Singapore government might profitably approach the phenomenon of very low fertility with major initiatives similar to those of other advanced industrialized societies. This book offers a significant contribution to the literature on social policy, East Asian and Southeast Asian studies.

This book presents a global perspective on the political agency of arts in place. International and leading scholars and artists themselves present critical theory and practice of contemporary art as a politicised force. This book extends thinking on contemporary arts practices in the urban and political context of protest and social resilience and offers the prism of a ‘critical artscape’ in which to view the urgent interaction of arts and the urban politic.

This edited volume focuses on how multiculturalism, as statecraft, has had both intended and unintended consequences on Singapore’s various ethnic communities. The contributing authors address and update contemporary issues and developments in the practice of multiculturalism in Singapore by interfacing the practice of multiculturalism over two critical periods, the colonial and the global. The coverage of the first period examines the colonial origins and conception of multiculturalism and the post-colonial application of multiculturalism as a project of the nation and its consequences for the Tamil Muslim, Ceylon-Tamil, and Malay communities. The content on the second period addresses immigration in the context of globalization with the arrival of new immigrants from South and East Asia, who pose a challenge to the concept and practice of multiculturalism in Singapore. For both periods, the contributors examine how the old migrants have attempted to come to terms with living in a multicultural society that has been constructed in the image of the state, and how the new migrants will reshape that society in the course of their ongoing politics of identity.

In many Western countries, social welfare payments are increasingly being made conditional on recipients doing voluntary work or attending job training courses, a system known as "welfare-to-work" or "workfare". Although social welfare in Asia is very different to the West, with much smaller social welfare budgets, a strong self-reliance and a much higher dependency on family networks to provide support, the workfare approach is also being adopted in many Asian countries. This is the first book to provide a comprehensive overview of how welfare reform around work is implemented in leading East Asian. Based on the experiences of seven East Asian economies - including China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong and Macau - this book critically analyses current trends; the social, economic and political factors which lead to the implementation of workfare; compares the similarities and differences of workfare in the different polities and assesses their effectiveness.