Book 

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. 

I argue 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, I further demonstrate 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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