Building deservingness and fairness with discourse: how states construct the social legitimacy of pension schemes

How do modern states legitimize and frame their redistributive social policies in promoting policy changes to the public? This article studies pension reform in China, using quantitative text analysis of articles from official newspapers to investigate the state’s efforts in framing and crafting the social legitimacy–particularly deservingness and fairness–of its then-new pension schemes from 1978 to 2008. The results demonstrate that the state made efforts to reconstruct social knowledge on fairness and deservingness in pension reforms through both the social values and individual subjectivities. The state’s strategies for reconstructing public expectations for pension benefit redistribution and welfare responsibility allocation differ for retrenchment and expansive reforms, even though these strategies both target recrafting and reframing the principles of reciprocity based on ‘contribution and rewards’ and ‘rights and obligations’. The state also builds images of deserving and undeserving social groups by blurring the distinction between merit and equity and ultimately reshaping individual subjectivity as a self-regulated and self-motivated ‘socialized self’.