Abstract
This chapter reports findings of an empirical study on female home care workers’ experiences of providing home-based personal care for senior clients in Shanghai. It unravels how care work has been shaped by the rural-urban divide from care workers’ perspective. The experiences of providing care are fractured on three fronts: (1) care is simultaneously viewed as a moral duty and paid work; (2) care workers are caught in between resisting the disdained care worker identity and embracing the image of a compassionate self as care provider; and (3) care work performed by migrant and local care workers is differentially valued. The conclusion reflects on the role social policy plays in shaping care work in a transitioning society and argues that public care programs could perpetuate inequalities if care is considered an area in isolation from other policy realms, such as social protection.
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Notes
- 1.
The household registration (hukou) system is a pivotal institution in China through which the Chinese government controls the migration of people and organizes welfare provision. This system was introduced in the 1950s. It categorizes Chinese citizens into “agricultural” (i.e., rural) and “non-agricultural” (i.e., urban) classes.
- 2.
Street-level government is the lowest level of government in Shanghai. The population of the streets varies from thirty thousand to almost two hundred thousand people in Yangpu, the district with which this study is concerned.
- 3.
The hukou system institutionalized contrasting urban and rural administrations. In the former, the government was responsible for providing welfare benefits, usually through employment, to the residents, e.g., rationed food, housing, health care, and education; whereas in the latter, people were expected to be self-sustaining or rely on collective cooperation. China’s post-reform social policy development clearly prioritized the urban areas. Rural migrants were long treated as “second-class citizens” in terms of denied welfare benefits and public services in cities where they work and live. In recent years, efforts have been made to mitigate the rural-urban gap by developing universal social programs, but their practical success is yet to be assessed (Hong and Kongshøj 2014).
- 4.
This is hardly a new idea, for servants and maids have always existed in Chinese culture, for example as depicted in the Chinese literary classic, Dream of the Red Chamber. However, the forty years of socialism should have, in theory, reset class differences, eradicating such servitude.
- 5.
This is not an exhaustive list because local variations in dialect may exist.
- 6.
Definitions were translated from the fifth and sixth versions of the Contemporary Chinese Dictionary.
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Hong, L. (2017). Home Care for Elders in China’s Rural-Urban Dualism: Care Workers’ Fractured Experiences. In: Michel, S., Peng, I. (eds) Gender, Migration, and the Work of Care. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55086-2_4
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