Aging & Social Change: Ninth Interdisciplinary Conference

Abstract

The large-scale migration of young and middle-aged people from rural to urban China has resulted in a growing ageing population in rural areas with more complex care needs than ever before. The Chinese government has been seeking to meet the increasing needs in different ways, especially by externalizing the provision of care services. Existing studies have discussed different provision strategies adopted by lower-level governments, but less work has been done to understand the dynamic nature of governments’ choices and behaviors. This paper accounts for lower-level governments’ choices of different provision strategies by examining their political will to deliver quality services to the elderly in rural communities. Data were collected from nine counties in three provinces across coastal, interior, and western China in 2018. This paper draws on a range of data sources including documentary studies, semi-structured interviews, and non-participant observations. There were twenty-two lower-level government officials, twelve service providers, and twenty-nine service recipients participated in interviews. The researcher also conducted observations at nine elderly care centers.This paper argues that, in the national policy direction for externalizing the provision of elderly care services, lower-level governments’ political will influences their responsiveness to the top-down policies, which in turn affects their choices of different provision strategies. The empirical findings show that lower-level governments tend to take a more formal approach to externalize the provision of aged care services when they have a higher degree of political will. The formality of the approaches decreases with the degree of political will.