Community and Inequality: One-Yuan Elder Home in Rural Zhejiang Province of China

Background and Purpose: While previous research has identified home, community, and institution as three major options to provide care to the aging population (Engers & Stern, 2002), inadequate efforts have been made to explore innovative service models that mobilize and coordinate the different resources.  Moreover, in the current examination of the effects of various modes of elderly services, the scope is usually restrained in the domain of family (e.g., Kim & Kim, 2003).  There is thus insufficient knowledge of the impacts of the organization of elderly care on community solidarity, welfare entitlement, and social inequality.

To fill in the gaps, this study examines the model of One-Yuan Elder Home that emerged in rural villages in Zhejiang Province of China in the 2000s.  The community-based public institution provides equal access to decent living spaces to all the elders in the village, at the cost of one yuana year, and mandates service contributions of their adult children in the service agreement.  The paper interrogates how villagers’ participation in the collective arrangement of elderly care constructs and articulates their understanding of welfare rights and citizenship in the changing countryside of China.

Methods: Five-week ethnographic fieldwork was carried out at the One-YuanElder Home of Qiu Village, the first of its kind in the region, in 2012-2013, and qualitative data were gathered through three ways: participant observation, 12 in-depth interviews with villagers and local cadres, and local archives on village-based elderly care.  The data were synthesized to answer how this innovative elder home operates in the cohesive rural community and addresses the increasing socioeconomic inequality in the village, and how it shapes the meaning of community and the discourses of social justice in contemporary China.

Results:  The One-YuanElder Home of Qiu Village combines the models of family, community, and institutional care and produces satisfaction not only among the elders but also in the village community.  However, in service delivery, while the elder home states to promote equality and reciprocal commitment among villagers, elders from wealthier families can enjoy better housing conditions and their adult children are often exempted from service duties.  Vulnerable groups, including the aging parents-in-law of male villagers and the migrants, are constantly excluded.  These practices are not only accepted as social norms, but are sometimes hailed as fulfilling justice. 

When the bonded community is called to deal with the drastic social stratification of post-socialist China, it unfortunately follows the prevalent discourses in the nation – differential treatment based on wealth, status, and power (Davis & Wang, 2009) – and offers few insightful critiques or alternative constructions, even though such practices challenge and erode its cherished values of equality and empowerment.    

Conclusions and Implications: In the global retrenchment of centralized social welfare, service planning, organizing, and delivery in local communities can be a promising direction of provision.  But it is crucial to adopt a justice-oriented approach to plan and implement community-based programs, with adequate regulations and critical discussions of social justice in the social and cultural contexts of the communities.