Against this backdrop, Guo (2016) discussed the varying epistemologies of Western social work practice models using evidence-based practice (EBP) and action-reflective practice (ARP) as examples at either end of the empirical-pragmatic spectrum. Grounded in research, the EBP model sought to improve the effectiveness of services and efficacy of professional practice. Rooted in pragmatism, the ARP combined empirical and practical knowledge tailored to local situations. It favored situational, case-by-case, on-the-spot experiments and offered a micro-integrated foundation for professional competence. Guo (2022a) believed both models were limited, calling for structural approaches grounded in emancipatory social theories that promoted individual awareness and action to change vulnerable people’s alienation and oppression. In questioning the applicability of Western social work theories and models, such as EBP and ARP, and their fit with traditional Chinese culture and socialist ideology, Luk (2017) drew on the theory of developmental social work (hereafter DSW) as pioneered in South Africa. Thus, he suggested a balanced focus on economic and social development, with social work in China following South Africa’s lead in positioning itself within the country’s social development, poverty alleviation, and community development processes. Describing social development as a government-led multifaceted system of social governance involving social work, nongovernment, and community organizations, he believed China’s welfare system should follow South Africa’s adoption of a developmental perspective, focused on social investment, community economy, and employment participation using DSW strategies involving community-based, sustainable livelihood approaches, participatory, democratic decision-making and social planning, and social policy practice and advocacy (Figure 2).

Within the government-procurement environment, the effective integration of professional social work in community governance became a critical issue in the goal of helping people to help themselves. Zhang (2011) believed that to address people’s livelihood needs, social workers should adopt community-based strategies focused on sustainable livelihoods through economic empowerment, democratic participation, cultural heritage preservation, fair trade, urban–rural cooperation, mutual help, and environmental protection. Only then, could they respond to poverty and unsustainable development, and promote social justice.

In DSW, communities served as the primary workplace for social workers. Promoting people’s capabilities involved increasing their situational agency, which, in turn, enhanced their self-determination (Tong, 2023). Xu and Huang’s (2020) study of a community center in Shenzhen showed the interactive relationship, and logic of action, between professional social workers and regional power subjects. The party-led project logic—embedding (weak) social workforces and (strong) regional administrative power subjects—led to the failure of professional social work practice. More effective was the restructured and optimized community governance structure that required professional social workers to integrate grassroots party and government resources to address common concerns. The party’s leadership supported actions to enhance people’s participation in community governance. Social workers could exercise some autonomy in doing this through the services they provide.

Zhang (2016) argued that to tackle local livelihood, living conditions, and environmental issues and further social justice and sustainable economic and social development, social workers had to maintain a strong community presence and collaborative relationship with the residents. This was especially important as community social work roles of capacity building, resource linkage, collaboration, and facilitation rested on trust. The primary goal was to revitalize the sociocultural fabric, livelihoods, and environmental sustainability of urban and rural communities by fostering public participation, promoting economic development, providing neighbourhood support, celebrating cultural diversity, and encouraging environmental friendliness.

Calling for decolonized social work education and practice, and participatory action research, DSW sought to respond to local community needs. Sensitive to local cultures and contexts, it valued local over professional knowledge. This developmental approach fit Guo’s (2022b) vision of people-centered transformative social work that valued local knowledge and complemented the functions of traditional families and communities. Centered on empowerment, it sought to strengthen family and community relationships, make personal troubles public issues, and facilitate people’s participation in local development. It sought collective rather than individualistic practice methods, including community development, social policy engagement, and advocacy, and called for positive and productive rather than resistant and deconstructive engagement. Ultimately, DSW aimed to create thriving, liveable communities, where residents could lead happy and fulfilling lives. Social workers needed to intervene to improve rural resident’s livelihoods by engaging in community economic activities, establishing farmer’s cooperatives, and training local practitioners and volunteers (He, 2020; Jiang, Ping, & Sun, 2018). The social economy approach offered a model for community economic engagement.

Situated between the public and private capitalist economies, the social economy propagated under Third Way politics in Europe and Australia constituted a third—nonpublic, for-profit—sector comprising social organisations or enterprises, including businesses with social causes (Chaves & Monzón, 2012; Gray & Crofts, 2002; Gray, Healy, & Crofts, 2003). Its goal was to alleviate dependency on state welfare through the development of for-profit social enterprises. Associated with social capital, the social economy was also the terrain of local community economic development and social entrepreneurship (Gray & Crofts, 2002; Kay, 2006). It rested on local ingenuity to alleviate the effects of welfare cutbacks as neoliberalism took hold. It excluded not-for-profit private welfare organizations that did not engage in “economic activity with a social remit” (Smith, 2005, p. 276), though encompassed cooperatives, mutual aid and self-help organizations, and voluntary associations that engaged in income generation or supported the livelihoods of their members. Based on principles of social justice, economic empowerment, democratic participation, and shared decision-making, social economy organizations mobilized local people’s engagement in cooperative, voluntary, and collective income-generating activities designed to further developmental outcomes and meet people’s livelihood needs. Motivated by shared interests, their members worked to find ways to support and enhance their income-generating activities, plowing profits back into growing the enterprise.

Defined as “an economy organized in such a way as to serve the needs and aspirations of ordinary people, not elites” (Wright, 2006, p. 107), Ku (2012) believed that the social economy offered rural social workers an alternative form of local, bottom-up, people-centered, community-based economic development. Focused on economic or income-generating activities, it capitalized on the linkages between and well-being of inter-related economic actors, including producers and consumers, and economic activities from procuring goods for production, marketing, and sales.

Ku and Kan (2020) saw the social economy approach as a viable, emancipatory alternative that provided practical strategies for community economic empowerment and social development. They referred to social economy as a social work practice framework that, in their case study of the Lvgeng model in Pingzhai administrative village, in the northeastern region of Yunnan province in Southwest China, promoted community empowerment and sustainable rural development (Table 2). It also served as a poverty-alleviation strategy for rural farmers. They noted that it had inspired social workers to explore this alternative pathway for “sustainable food production and consumption” (Ku & Kan, 2020, p. 353). It empowered rural producers while giving urban consumers access to affordable, locally and sustainably produced food. Responding to the increasing demands for safe and healthy foods in urban areas, rural producers, organized into cooperatives, grew organic crops using sustainable farming practices. Chinese social workers, adopting fair-trade principles, helped rural producers connect directly with urban consumers to sell their produce at a favorable price:

As a guiding notion for social work practice, social economy integrates people and their socio-cultural, economic and physical environments within an egalitarian framework that has the potential to address prevailing structural inequalities and unequal distribution of power and resources. It is pluralistic, bottom-up, democratic, and non-monopolistic, and it prioritizes the needs of local communities. This social work approach offers useful insights for addressing agrarian challenges and building toward sustainable rural development (Ku & Kan, 2020, p. 353).

The developmental approach worked in tandem with the system of government-purchased contracted social work services already described. The policy change in 2011 brought the outsourcing of public services and contracting of private social work services first in in the city of Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong province, effectively placing them under provincial government control through conditional funding mechanisms (Department of Civil Affairs of Guangdong Province, 2016). Anchored in market mechanisms, a dual principal-agent structure, and contract-based service management, outsourcing was short-term, project-based, and reliant on third-party oversight, assessment, and evaluation (Chen & Zheng, 2019). It brought numerous challenges as social work organizations sought to adapt to this privatized service environment. To gain the government’s trust and secure funding, social work organizations often cut costs through selective service provision with many focused on short-term outcomes rather than long-term community development initiatives, seemingly working against developmental goals. As the purchasing of services increased, competition intensified, leading to potential monopolies, secretive operations, kickbacks, illegal bidding, and tailor-made scoring. Third-party evaluations brought problems with self-determined criteria, and fabricated and malicious evaluations driven by significant commercial interests and the gradual erosion of objectivity (Chen & Zheng, 2019).

Initiated in 2017, the Shuangbai scheme by the Guangdong Provincial Department of Civil Affairs heralded a change in the approach to rural social service delivery (Kan & Ku, 2023). Rather than tailor-made services, it focused on improving people’s livelihoods through uniform, long-term, comprehensive, standardized service provision in rural communities (Chen & Zheng, 2019; Kan & Ku, 2023; Yan & Li, 2017). It established social work service stations across the province and thousands of new positions for professional social workers in these service stations with coordination centers at the municipal level that, in turn, oversaw welfare programs in the townships under their jurisdiction (Kan & Ku, 2023). Directly supervised, managed, and evaluated by the provincial government, each station employed a team of three to eight social workers (Chen & Zheng, 2019). The funding came from civil affairs offices at the provincial, municipal, and county levels, with the provincial department providing an annual budget of 17 million yuan for social work training and 12 million yuan for programs implemented by social work service stations (Kan & Ku, 2023). Reports indicated that the Guangdong provincial government planned to invest 1.458 billion yuan to increase the number of frontline social workers in the program to 30,000 and establish 1,611 social work workstations, allocating 30,000 yuan annually to each. Rather than contract NGOs to provide services, Shuangbai hired social workers on a contract basis (Kan & Ku, 2023; Lai, 2022).

Under Shuangbai’s standardised, top-down scheme, the state played a direct role in staff hiring and program design, while the township government of each project site was responsible for recruiting social workers to staff the community service stations. Rather than being employees of existing NGOs, these social workers worked for the government on a contract basis and reported directly to government agencies. They were also required to go through a standardized training program in its administrative-led approach designed by the provincial department of civil affairs. Under the scheme, social workers received uniform training and instructions on how to engage with the different neighbourhoods through their stations. Shuangbai projects had a singular focus on improving service delivery and enhancing grassroots governance, in line with the portfolio of the Civil Affairs Department, with social workers performing administrative duties for the village government (Kan & Ku, 2023). Under Shuangbai, professional service provision involved individual assistance that began with building trust with officials in local government and village committees; identifying people in need; gathering information about the individual’s family structure, employment, income, and health; and creating a service plan, including follow-up and eventual termination of assistance (Zhang & Liao, 2021a).

Zhang and Liao (2021a) believed that Shuangbai should go beyond addressing livelihoods to investing in human and social capital. Lai (2022) saw the potential for DSW through which Chinese social workers applied social work techniques to achieve community development goals by prioritizing vulnerable people and communities and using community-based interventions (Zhang & Liao, 2021b). Zhang and Liao (2021b) described the underlying developmental practice theory’s grounding in sociological analyses of social problems and the theory of social capital. Social workers assessed the problems of service users in the social context of the community using an assets-based community development framework. Essentially, in the developmental model, social work involves the resolution of individual problems by investing in people, helping them to build their capacity, drawing on social capital, and capitalizing on market opportunities to promote self-reliance, thereby contributing to poverty reduction.

Important to social workers’ potential to contribute to community and social development was their ability to meet the myriad professional challenges each successive policy change brought. Essentially, social workers were constantly seeking ways to enhance professional recognition. Two processes critical to this in the social work discourse in China was increasing social work’s relevance and responsiveness to local conditions; this meant that ensuring their practice theories and methods were fit for purpose through a process of indigenization. Initially, social work fell under the jurisdiction of civil affairs. Thus, early on, Wang (2001) conceptualized authentic social work within the context of civil mutual help and statutory welfare. As social workers adapted to successive policy changes and the multiple tasks assigned to them, indigenization increasingly became a process of Sinicisation (Xu, Tian, & Sun, 2021) that has intensified under post-2020 developments embedding social work in party-building activities through service provision and grassroots development. It is to these matters the discussion now turns. Table 2 describes the Lvgeng model and Shuangbai scheme.

As the implementation of quality social work services proved difficult in China’s constantly changing political environment and service structure, the government reported reflected dissatisfaction with social work services (Song, 2019). Lu’s (2019) study found that most social work practitioners lacked the professional expertise and experience to cope with the multiple tasks assigned to them. As well as controlling work environments, some scholars noted that the ongoing use of mainstream Western social work theories had hampered social workers’ responsiveness to local people’s needs; thus, the need to transform Chinese social work to respond to local problems and cultures to enhance professional recognition (Xu et al., 2022; Yan & Cheung, 2006; Yan & Tsang, 2008; Yunong & Xiong, 2008).

In the early 2000s, Wang (2001) distinguished between the indigenization of social work introduced by the Global North and authentic, indigenous social work involving local, administrative, and civil affairs work. He described indigenous social work in China as administrative and semi-professional, with social workers deployed within the civil affairs administrative structure. It was semi-professional because those who undertook administrative, and civil affairs tasks did not have a professional social work education. At the time, there was a lack of nongovernment services, so Chinese people tended to seek help from relatives and friends in keeping with Chinese cultural traditions. An individual’s social identity determined the assistance they could receive from the government welfare system, while their social relationships determined the help they could obtain from the civil system of family and community support networks. Thus, for Wang (2001), authentic social work constituted civil mutual help and statutory welfare, because, as modernization intensified, the traditional mutual help system within families and communities could no longer function as effectively as before and only a robust welfare system could meet people’s service needs. However, the public welfare system could not cope with the problems arising from fast-paced urbanization and the central government would, as we have shown, later turn to the community “as a new locus of welfare provision and the basic unit of governance in urban China” (Yuen, 2020, p. 167).

Twenty years later, Xu et al. (2021) identified three stages of development of in social work in China: Indigenization, authentication, and Sinicization. Spanning 1987 to 2005, the first stage of indigenization involved the uncritical importation of social work theory and practice from Hong Kong, the USA, and Europe. From 2006 to 2012, the second stage of authentication involved the selective importation of Western social work knowledge and the training of a large social work workforce with social work academics and tutors from Hong Kong playing a key role. Beginning in 2013, the third stage of Sinicization saw social work firmly embedded in state-introduced, party-led system of social governance that emphasized responsiveness to local communities, and Chinese cultural values and socialist policies. Sinicization involved the development of Chinese models that addressed Chinese ethnicity, culture, and history and conformed to socialist goals and objectives. Wang (2023) referred to social work’s attempts to respond to the state’s agenda of Chinese-style modernization and intervene in areas such as social assistance, rural revitalization, migrant worker inclusion, social service provision, and social governance as a renewed process of indigenization

With the sociopolitical context as a structural hindrance for the Indigenization of professional values and standards, social work in China had to strike a delicate balance between adhering to its foundational values and conforming to the broader political agenda. Essentially, social work’s effectiveness was dependent on its relevance and utility in serving the state’s political agenda and the respective interests of state bureaucrats and key players involved (Yan & Tsang, 2008). In addressing the sociocultural impacts of economic reform within China’s authoritarian, institutional governing structures, it straddled traditional Chinese cultures and contemporary political ideologies and related discourses (Leung, 2014; Meng et al., 2022). In an authoritarian environment such as this, social work is always political, no matter what the intervention involves. To be successful, social workers need to engage in political processes right down to gaining the support of local government officials and power elites. Unsurprisingly, the profession faced many challenges within this sociopolitical milieu.

As discussed, the risk-aversive political environment, restrictive service context, lack of policy support and social recognition, and absence of a strong civil society reduced social workers’ inclinations to engage in sensitive structural issues and advocate for marginalized groups (Huang & Xiong, 2018; Jiang, 2015; Yuen, 2020). These factors, coupled with limited autonomy and discretion, low salaries, lack of career development opportunities, and high living costs, led to a high turnover of social workers (Jiang, 2015). In Shenzhen, alone, the turnover rate increased from 8.2% in 2008 to 19.8% in 2013. The limited job opportunities outside major urban centers did not help the situation or the service environment, where qualified social work practitioners were in the minority, and practitioners without formal social work training provided poor quality services. This had a severe impact on professional development, especially relating to ethical practice standards. More broadly, the pressure to conform to mainstream political ideology has led to a dilution of professional social work values (Zheng & Zhang, 2020). This has led to low professional practice standards and a unique form of government-dominated social work implementing a state-led administrative decolonizing framework (Lin, 2022). It also led to a continued emphasis on individual casework and disregard for social reform, as state control limited social work’s political mandate (Gao & Yan, 2015; Zhang & Liao, 2021b). Nevertheless, there were concerted attempts to indigenize Western social work theories and approaches that were consistent and aligned with Chinese cultural norms and political ideologies. In the main, however, indigenous social work in China focused on service provision and system maintenance rather than social change (Zheng & Zhang, 2020).

There have been various interpretations on the challenges faced by the profession. For example, Zhang and Liao (2021b) perceived four major challenges. The first related to its limited role in social assistance and governance in practice. The second related to the difficulties in dislodging Western theories and models that were inconsistent with Chinese culture and political ideology in education and practice. The third was the large number of practitioners without a social work education and professional qualifications, and the fourth, was social work’s ambivalent relationship with the government, due to the limits it placed on professional development and social responsiveness. For Zheng and Zhang (2020), social work faced three challenges. The first related to the loss of its social functions, due to its absorption in government and positioning as an administrator of grassroots governance. The second to a loss of professional autonomy, due to the profession’s heavy reliance on government resources and funding support, and the time-consuming need to conform to the government terms of service provision and third-party assessments. The third related to the loss of comprehensive service provision with social workers selectively targeting low-needs clients to meet performance measures and favoring nonpolitical casework, teamwork, and community work rather than emancipatory social action and advocacy. There was a huge pressure toward conformity to core Chinese values, such as prosperity, civility, harmony, freedom, equality and the rule of law, patriotism, dedication, integrity, and friendship, and China’s sociocultural dictum of helping people to help themselves. There was a danger that, in catering to party-political ideology and principles, social workers would lose their professional standpoint and rights-and-justice focus.

For Zheng and Zhang (2020), indigenization in China effectively involved aligning professional social work values with the government’s program to promote social harmony. Social workers had to conform to government-approved education and practice standards through the accreditation and licensing examination that validated the credentials of practitioners, including assistant social workers and social workers without professional education. Eligibility was broad. Administrative personnel or community workers engaged in “social work practice” could become “social workers” if they passed the exam. The exam content emphasized mainstream ideologies, such as adhering to socialist core values and person-centered principles. As a result, administrators in the community committee became “social workers” and, through the credential exam, could offer government-purchased social services even though they lacked professional skills, approaches, and values. They used administrative methods and drew on their grassroots experience, favoring pragmatic rather than value-based professional practice founded on critical thinking and reflection. This effectively weakened the professional organization of social work, with the relationship between social work organizations, social workers, and the government resembling labor dispatching, in which the government issued contracts to purchase services from social work organizations employing social workers. The community committee, rather than the professional social work, organizational structure became the primary employer of social workers. In some underdeveloped areas, the local government changed job positions in community committees to social work positions, resulting in social workers practicing without any affiliation to social work organisations.

Within this organisational environment, Zheng, Wang, and Ma (2021) labeled social workers, sanctioned and mandated by the state, “red” practitioners to signify allegiance to a party-political stance and ideology rather than an autonomous professional mandate. They argued that the state used instructional leadership to promote service efficacy and enhance the legitimacy of its governance, while professionals lacked autonomy. “Leading the profession with red” was its strategy for shaping social work.