Fundamental changes in China’s finance system for social services have
decentralized responsibilities for provision to lower levels of government and
increased costs to individuals. The more localized, market-oriented approaches to
social service provision, together with rising economic inequalities, raise questions
about access to social services among China’s children. With a multivariate analysis
of three waves of the China Health and Nutrition Survey (1989, 1993 and 1997), this
article investigates two dimensions of children’s social welfare: health care, operationalized
as access to health insurance, and education, operationalized as enrolment
in and progress through school. Three main results emerge. First, analyses do not
suggest an across-the-board decline in access to these child welfare services during
the period under consideration. Overall, insurance rates, enrolment rates and gradefor-age
attainment improved. Secondly, while results underscore the considerable
disadvantages in insurance and education experienced by poorer children in each
wave of the survey, there is no evidence that household socio-economic disparities
systematically widened. Finally, findings suggest that community resources conditioned
the provision of social services, and that dimensions of community level of
development and capacity to finance public welfare increasingly mattered for some
social services.