AE Joseph

B Heaphy

ET Miller

J Liu

K-S Chang

N Gross

S Jackson

T Hesketh

U Beck

X Qi

XY Shang

Y Yan

Stevi Jackson

Jieyu Liu

Springer - Publisher Connector

EDITORIAL Open Access
The social context of ageing and
intergenerational relationships in Chinese
families
Stevi Jackson1 and Jieyu Liu2*
* Correspondence:
jieyu.liu@soas.ac.uk
2SOAS China Institute, SOAS
University of London, London
WC1H 0XG, UK
Full list of author information is
available at the end of the article
Population ageing is a global issue, primarily in richer and developed countries, and raises
questions about the place of elders in society, their quality of life, and care for those who
can no longer care for themselves, as well as the wider socio-economic consequences of
population imbalance. China is a very specific case as the demographic transition from a
youthful society to an ageing one took place at an earlier stage of economic development
than in most richer countries and has happened much faster. This is partly a consequence
of the imposition of the one child-policy, rather than a gradual decrease in family size
through couples choosing to have fewer children, but also reflects a particularly dramatic
increase in life expectancy over the last half century, from around 43 in the 1960s to 76
in 2014.1
The one-child policy was introduced in 1979, after which couples were only allowed to
give birth to one child. In urban areas, this policy was strictly implemented through the
work unit (danwei) (Liu 2007). Since the work unit was the most important (sometimes
only) source of livelihood for urban residents prior to the 1990s, urban couples had to
comply with this social control, for which they were compensated with a pension from
their work unit (Liu 2007). But in rural areas, since farmers were largely dependent on
their children to assist with farm work and old age support, there was considerable resist-
ance. As a result, from the mid-1980s, the state modified the policy for rural couples so
that if their first child was a girl they were allowed another child (Hesketh et al. 2005).
More recently, the policy has been relaxed for urban couples as well, in part because of
concerns about China’s ageing society. In 2015, the number of people in China who were
60 and over had reached 222 million (16% of the population, China’s Ministry of Civil Af-
fairs 2016). By 2050, this number is expected to exceed 400 million (35% of the popula-
tion). What makes China different, and the challenges more acute, is the sheer number of
people (almost 20% of the world’s population), the stage of economic development, and
the relatively low GNP. While state policy has played a critical part in contributing to
super ageing in China (Joseph and Phillips 1999), the state is reluctant to provide compre-
hensive welfare and pension support for all its citizens, especially rural residents due to
the long institutionalized urban-rural divide. As a result, families remain the main source
of welfare and support in contemporary China (Shang and Wu 2011).
Chinese families bear the brunt of this demographic challenge in a wider context of
extremely rapid socio-economic transformations since the inception of the economic
The Journal of
Chinese Sociology
© The Author(s). 2017 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,
provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and
indicate if changes were made.
Jackson and Liu The Journal of Chinese Sociology  (2017) 4:2 
DOI 10.1186/s40711-016-0050-1
reform in the 1980s. The gap in life experience and expectations between generations
can, as a result, be very wide. The younger generation in urban cities, unlike their
parents whose education suffered during the Cultural Revolution, tend to have higher
educational qualifications, and many are becoming white-collar professionals; while still
deeply embedded in intergenerational ties, they develop more individualistic ideas
focusing upon self-development (Liu 2016a). With China’s opening up and the easing of
restrictions on rural to urban mobility, the younger generation tend to be more mobile,
whether it be inter-city migration or overseas migration in urban families or large-scale
rural to urban migration in rural families. This geographical mobility features, in differ-
ent ways and to different degrees, in all the articles in this special issue. Not only does
mobility increase physical distances between family members, but also potentially cul-
tural distance as young people develop new lifestyles separate from their parents. As
some go abroad for education or work, and increasing numbers of foreigners live and
work in China, young people may be exposed to different ideas about family life.
Cross-national marriages are also an outcome of these new patterns of mobility, which
further complicate the challenges facing Chinese families (see Nehring and Wang).
This background creates new challenges to old ideals of filial piety, which have long
been the guiding principle of relations between ageing parents and adult children.
Moreover, as a result of the one child policy, many younger adults born after 1980 have
no support from siblings in managing provision for their parents in old age, thus in-
creasing their potential burden. This special issue makes a timely contribution to un-
derstanding some of the consequences of population ageing for intergenerational
relations in China through qualitative research on family strategies and practices. The
papers included do not focus on the obvious problems of ageing (or the elderly as a
problem), but instead highlight subtler, but nonetheless important changes taking place
in Chinese families in terms of renegotiating intergenerational obligations and planning
to manage care and support in the context of a rapidly ageing society, new family
configurations and insufficient welfare support from the state.
The nature of the intergenerational contract has evolved from a model of submission
embodied in traditional filial piety to a diversified model. For example, by analyzing
families split between China and the UK, Tu reveals that adult children in the UK and
their parents in China are embedded in a close two-way transfer model despite the geo-
graphic distance: rather than relying upon their children, these parents were important
source of material support to their children; one-child migrants tended to compensate
for the lack of material/practical care by providing long distance emotional care to their
parents. Focusing upon the impact of rural to urban migration upon rural households,
Liu indicates that care circulates between different family members, in different loca-
tions, to differing degrees, over the life course, going beyond a unidirectional flow, or
two-way transfer.
The characteristics of the intergenerational contract seems also to be undergoing
modification. Although traditional filial piety emphasizes all-round support from adult
children to their parents, existing studies have found that material support was the
main and sometimes only old age support actually provided (Miller 2004). While
acknowledging material provision in old age remains critical in the context of insuffi-
cient state welfare, other aspects of intergenerational relations are gradually becoming
important. For example, among the transnational families in the UK, Tu reveals that
Jackson and Liu The Journal of Chinese Sociology  (2017) 4:2 Page 2 of 5
emotional support is the main way in which adult children reciprocate parents’ material
support. Nehring and Wang argue that among the Chinese transnational families in
Beijing, the family becomes an individualized intimate space, within which meanings of
family, filial piety, and marriage cannot be taken for granted and require an ongoing
process of reflexive negotiation to become and remain mutually acceptable to both for-
eign spouses and the Chinese families into which they have married. Liu demonstrates
how the delivery of good quality care from adult migrating children to parents depends
upon a number of factors, one of which being how intimate parents are with their chil-
dren. Zhang’s data indicates varied forms of care and material support depending on
the circumstances of both parents and adult children as well as the specific material
and emotional needs of the former and resources (of both time and money) of the lat-
ter, sometimes resulting in complex intrafamilial negotiations and arrangements involv-
ing wider kin. Whatever the living arrangements and economic situation of these, the
northern Chinese research families, the ideal of filial obligation was retained, even
though it was practiced in diverse, and often new, ways.
The structure of Chinese families is changing. Unlike the traditional ideal under
which several generations lived under one roof and shared one stove, separation has be-
come a common and accepted feature of contemporary Chinese family life. As Zhang,
Liu, and Tu all found, however, adult children living apart from their parents does not
lead to the erosion of filial piety. However, the consequences of migration for the prac-
tice of filial piety are variable. Because of the different economic background of the
families in Liu’s rural sample and Tu’s more affluent urban residents, how they were
adapting to the separation and the consequences of ageing differed tremendously. Such
differences also emerge within Zhang’s study, which includes some wealthier families
where ageing parents do not need economic support, but also those on modest income
and those with parents in rural areas who need economic support from their children
to survive.
Another key feature of this special issue is that all the studies are qualitative in focus.
While statistical analyses of demographic change and its consequences are important in
sketching out broad contours of the social landscape, qualitative studies such as those
presented here add texture and detail, enabling us to understand the experiences and
interpretations of the people who have gone through these social changes and popula-
tion challenges. For example, Zhang reveals the nuanced ways in which displaying in-
timacy plays a role in maintaining intergenerational bonds, the importance of acts of
care that give face to elders and therefore contribute to their emotional wellbeing—as
well as adult children themselves gaining face, or avoiding its loss, through appropriate
displays of filial piety. Liu points out that existing surveys only used the term zhaogu
(care for) which cannot capture the quality of care relationships. The care about elem-
ent is more neatly captured through ethnographic observations and interviews where
individuals are enabled to discuss their feelings for their elders and the dilemmas they
face in day to day life. The complexity of families that include non-Chinese members,
as discussed by Nehring and Wang, highlights the different cultural norms of filial ex-
pectations and practices which pose interesting and unpredictable challenges unlikely
to be revealed by survey data.
These papers also offer some conceptual advances and interventions into ongoing
sociological debates. This is perhaps most obvious in Zhang’s paper where she argues
Jackson and Liu The Journal of Chinese Sociology  (2017) 4:2 Page 3 of 5
for bringing western sociological concepts such as practices of intimacy and displaying
family into dialogue with Chinese concepts of xiao and mianzi, thus following in the
footsteps of others who have suggested that Chinese concepts may have broader socio-
logical purchase (e.g., Qi 2014). All the papers, however, address the larger debates on
processes of individualization and detraditionalization and their contested conse-
quences for intimate relationships, which have been the subject of much debate in both
western and Asian contexts in recent decades (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002; Gross
2005; Heaphy 2007; Yan 2009; Chang and Song 2010; Jamieson 2011). All the papers
indicate that it is unwise to think of these processes as either linear or universal. It is
clear that in Chinese society, as elsewhere, relationships with intimate others continue
to be important in how individuals see themselves and their social obligations (see also
Liu 2016b)2 ; and, rather than assuming a simple move away from traditional precepts,
we should think perhaps of the ways in which traditions are reshaped and renegotiated
to meet new circumstances and the importance of material constraints for such modifi-
cations (Jackson et al. 2013).
The papers in this special issue all address, in various ways, how members of modern
Chinese families are negotiating changes in relationships between generations and the
opportunities and constraints that face them. So what conclusions can we reach in this
special issue? We found that there is continued importance of filial piety but it has
been reconstructed and reworked under new conditions. Chinese families now look
very different from those of 1949. Families have grown smaller with the decline in in-
tergenerational co-residence and the impact of the one-child policy, but children and
parents maintain close ties and exchanges of material, instrumental, and emotional sup-
port. The Confucian family ideology which undergirded relations between elders and
the young, husbands and wives, has been shaken so that intergenerational relations are
more often based on mutuality than on obedience, but the practical need for family
care to compensate for inadequate social welfare ensures that filial piety is still
expressed, albeit in a modified form. We also need to take account of the geographical
and economic constraints facing families when care for ill or disabled elders becomes
necessary. As Zhang’s study indicates, those who are relatively affluent can consider the
possibilities of hiring domestic help or paying for a private care home—even if the lat-
ter proves problematic in terms of traditional filial norms. For poorer couples juggling
the multiple demands of maintaining an adequate income, caring for their child or chil-
dren and elders, a crisis in the life circumstances of their parents could prove close to
unmanageable (see also Liu’s rural sample). Since traditional family practices have
changed, there is an urgent need for the state policy-makers to catch up with reality
and take into consideration the diversified family forms and new family practices rather
than take the Chinese family for granted and assume that families can always provide
care for ageing relatives.
Endnotes
1Statistics are for life expectancy at birth as reported by the World Bank. Available
at http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.IN?locations = CN, Accessed 27/
11/2016.
2Liu (2016b) examines how the sociological concept of intimacy could be utilized
in studying the relationship between adult children and aging parents in China, an area
Jackson and Liu The Journal of Chinese Sociology  (2017) 4:2 Page 4 of 5
which has been predominantly located in an obligatory framework (embodied in filial
piety [xiao] and its newly modified form intergenerational contract). Liu reveals that
the complex relations between intimacy and obligation are the product of local socio-
economic circumstances and gender norms.
Authors’ contributions
Both authors read and approved the final manuscript.
Competing interests
The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
Author details
1Centre for Women’s Studies, University of York, York YO10 5DD, UK. 2SOAS China Institute, SOAS University of London,
London WC1H 0XG, UK.
Received: 8 December 2016 Accepted: 8 December 2016
References
Beck, U., and E. Beck-Gernsheim. 2002. Individualization: institutionalized individualism and its social and political
consequences. London: Sage.
Chang, K.-S., and M.-Y. Song. 2010. The stranded individualizer under compressed modernity: South Korean women in
individualization without individualism. British Journal of Sociology 61(3): 539–564.
China’s Ministry of Civil Affairs. 2016. 2015 Social Services Development Statistical Report. http://www.mca.gov.cn/article/
sj/tjgb/201607/20160700001136.shtml. Accessed 1/10/2016. [in Chinese].
Gross, N. 2005. The detraditionalization of intimacy reconsidered’. Sociological Theory 23(3): 268–311.
Heaphy, Brian. 2007. Late modernity and social change: reconstructing social and personal life. London: Routledge.
Hesketh, Therese, Li Lu, and Weixing Zhu. 2005. The effect of China’s one-child family policy after 25 years’. The New
England of Journal of Medicine. 353: 1171–1176.
Jackson, S., P.S.Y. Ho, and J.N. Na. 2013. Reshaping tradition? Women negotiating the boundaries of tradition and
modernity in Hong Kong and British families’. The Sociological Review 61(4): 667–688.
Joseph, A.E., and D.R. Phillips. 1999. Ageing in rural China: impacts of increasing diversity in family and community
resources’. Journal of Cross-Cultural Gerontology 14: 153.
Liu, Jieyu. 2007. Gender and work in urban China: women workers of the unlucky generation. London: Routledge.
Liu, Jieyu. 2016a. Gender, Power and Sexuality in Chinese Companies: Beauties at Work. London: Palgrave MacMillan.
Liu, Jieyu. 2016b. Intimacy and intergenerational relations in rural China, Sociology, 1-19. doi:10.1177/0038038516639505.
Jamieson, Lynn. 2011. ‘Intimacy as a concept: explaining social change in the context of globalization or another form
of ethnocentrism?’ Sociological Research Online, 16 (4), http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/4/15.html. Accessed 1
Nov 2016.
Miller, E.T. 2004. Filial daughters, filial sons: comparisons from north rural China. In Filial Piety, ed. C. Ikels, 34–52.
Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Qi, Xiaoying. 2014. Globalized knowledge flows and Chinese social theory. London: Routledge.
Shang, X.Y., and X.M. Wu. 2011. The care regime in China. Journal of Comparative Social Welfare 27(2): 123–131.
Yan, Yunxiang. 2009. The Individualization of Chinese Society. Oxford: Berg.
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Jackson and Liu The Journal of Chinese Sociology  (2017) 4:2 Page 5 of 5


The social context of ageing and intergenerational relationships in Chinese families

Jackson, Stevi

Liu, Jieyu

SOAS Research Online

EDITORIAL Open AccessThe social context of ageing andintergenerational relationships in ChinesefamiliesStevi Jackson1 and Jieyu Liu2** Correspondence:jieyu.liu@soas.ac.uk2SOAS China Institute, SOASUniversity of London, LondonWC1H 0XG, UKFull list of author information isavailable at the end of the articlePopulation ageing is a global issue, primarily in richer and developed countries, and raisesquestions about the place of elders in society, their quality of life, and care for those whocan no longer care for themselves, as well as the wider socio-economic consequences ofpopulation imbalance. China is a very specific case as the demographic transition from ayouthful society to an ageing one took place at an earlier stage of economic developmentthan in most richer countries and has happened much faster. This is partly a consequenceof the imposition of the one child-policy, rather than a gradual decrease in family sizethrough couples choosing to have fewer children, but also reflects a particularly dramaticincrease in life expectancy over the last half century, from around 43 in the 1960s to 76in 2014.1The one-child policy was introduced in 1979, after which couples were only allowed togive birth to one child. In urban areas, this policy was strictly implemented through thework unit (danwei) (Liu 2007). Since the work unit was the most important (sometimesonly) source of livelihood for urban residents prior to the 1990s, urban couples had tocomply with this social control, for which they were compensated with a pension fromtheir work unit (Liu 2007). But in rural areas, since farmers were largely dependent ontheir children to assist with farm work and old age support, there was considerable resist-ance. As a result, from the mid-1980s, the state modified the policy for rural couples sothat if their first child was a girl they were allowed another child (Hesketh et al. 2005).More recently, the policy has been relaxed for urban couples as well, in part because ofconcerns about China’s ageing society. In 2015, the number of people in China who were60 and over had reached 222 million (16% of the population, China’s Ministry of Civil Af-fairs 2016). By 2050, this number is expected to exceed 400 million (35% of the popula-tion). What makes China different, and the challenges more acute, is the sheer number ofpeople (almost 20% of the world’s population), the stage of economic development, andthe relatively low GNP. While state policy has played a critical part in contributing tosuper ageing in China (Joseph and Phillips 1999), the state is reluctant to provide compre-hensive welfare and pension support for all its citizens, especially rural residents due tothe long institutionalized urban-rural divide. As a result, families remain the main sourceof welfare and support in contemporary China (Shang and Wu 2011).Chinese families bear the brunt of this demographic challenge in a wider context ofextremely rapid socio-economic transformations since the inception of the economicThe Journal ofChinese Sociology© The Author(s). 2017 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 InternationalLicense (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, andindicate if changes were made.Jackson and Liu The Journal of Chinese Sociology  (2017) 4:2 DOI 10.1186/s40711-016-0050-1reform in the 1980s. The gap in life experience and expectations between generationscan, as a result, be very wide. The younger generation in urban cities, unlike theirparents whose education suffered during the Cultural Revolution, tend to have highereducational qualifications, and many are becoming white-collar professionals; while stilldeeply embedded in intergenerational ties, they develop more individualistic ideasfocusing upon self-development (Liu 2016a). With China’s opening up and the easing ofrestrictions on rural to urban mobility, the younger generation tend to be more mobile,whether it be inter-city migration or overseas migration in urban families or large-scalerural to urban migration in rural families. This geographical mobility features, in differ-ent ways and to different degrees, in all the articles in this special issue. Not only doesmobility increase physical distances between family members, but also potentially cul-tural distance as young people develop new lifestyles separate from their parents. Assome go abroad for education or work, and increasing numbers of foreigners live andwork in China, young people may be exposed to different ideas about family life.Cross-national marriages are also an outcome of these new patterns of mobility, whichfurther complicate the challenges facing Chinese families (see Nehring and Wang).This background creates new challenges to old ideals of filial piety, which have longbeen the guiding principle of relations between ageing parents and adult children.Moreover, as a result of the one child policy, many younger adults born after 1980 haveno support from siblings in managing provision for their parents in old age, thus in-creasing their potential burden. This special issue makes a timely contribution to un-derstanding some of the consequences of population ageing for intergenerationalrelations in China through qualitative research on family strategies and practices. Thepapers included do not focus on the obvious problems of ageing (or the elderly as aproblem), but instead highlight subtler, but nonetheless important changes taking placein Chinese families in terms of renegotiating intergenerational obligations and planningto manage care and support in the context of a rapidly ageing society, new familyconfigurations and insufficient welfare support from the state.The nature of the intergenerational contract has evolved from a model of submissionembodied in traditional filial piety to a diversified model. For example, by analyzingfamilies split between China and the UK, Tu reveals that adult children in the UK andtheir parents in China are embedded in a close two-way transfer model despite the geo-graphic distance: rather than relying upon their children, these parents were importantsource of material support to their children; one-child migrants tended to compensatefor the lack of material/practical care by providing long distance emotional care to theirparents. Focusing upon the impact of rural to urban migration upon rural households,Liu indicates that care circulates between different family members, in different loca-tions, to differing degrees, over the life course, going beyond a unidirectional flow, ortwo-way transfer.The characteristics of the intergenerational contract seems also to be undergoingmodification. Although traditional filial piety emphasizes all-round support from adultchildren to their parents, existing studies have found that material support was themain and sometimes only old age support actually provided (Miller 2004). Whileacknowledging material provision in old age remains critical in the context of insuffi-cient state welfare, other aspects of intergenerational relations are gradually becomingimportant. For example, among the transnational families in the UK, Tu reveals thatJackson and Liu The Journal of Chinese Sociology  (2017) 4:2 Page 2 of 5emotional support is the main way in which adult children reciprocate parents’ materialsupport. Nehring and Wang argue that among the Chinese transnational families inBeijing, the family becomes an individualized intimate space, within which meanings offamily, filial piety, and marriage cannot be taken for granted and require an ongoingprocess of reflexive negotiation to become and remain mutually acceptable to both for-eign spouses and the Chinese families into which they have married. Liu demonstrateshow the delivery of good quality care from adult migrating children to parents dependsupon a number of factors, one of which being how intimate parents are with their chil-dren. Zhang’s data indicates varied forms of care and material support depending onthe circumstances of both parents and adult children as well as the specific materialand emotional needs of the former and resources (of both time and money) of the lat-ter, sometimes resulting in complex intrafamilial negotiations and arrangements involv-ing wider kin. Whatever the living arrangements and economic situation of these, thenorthern Chinese research families, the ideal of filial obligation was retained, eventhough it was practiced in diverse, and often new, ways.The structure of Chinese families is changing. Unlike the traditional ideal underwhich several generations lived under one roof and shared one stove, separation has be-come a common and accepted feature of contemporary Chinese family life. As Zhang,Liu, and Tu all found, however, adult children living apart from their parents does notlead to the erosion of filial piety. However, the consequences of migration for the prac-tice of filial piety are variable. Because of the different economic background of thefamilies in Liu’s rural sample and Tu’s more affluent urban residents, how they wereadapting to the separation and the consequences of ageing differed tremendously. Suchdifferences also emerge within Zhang’s study, which includes some wealthier familieswhere ageing parents do not need economic support, but also those on modest incomeand those with parents in rural areas who need economic support from their childrento survive.Another key feature of this special issue is that all the studies are qualitative in focus.While statistical analyses of demographic change and its consequences are important insketching out broad contours of the social landscape, qualitative studies such as thosepresented here add texture and detail, enabling us to understand the experiences andinterpretations of the people who have gone through these social changes and popula-tion challenges. For example, Zhang reveals the nuanced ways in which displaying in-timacy plays a role in maintaining intergenerational bonds, the importance of acts ofcare that give face to elders and therefore contribute to their emotional wellbeing—aswell as adult children themselves gaining face, or avoiding its loss, through appropriatedisplays of filial piety. Liu points out that existing surveys only used the term zhaogu(care for) which cannot capture the quality of care relationships. The care about elem-ent is more neatly captured through ethnographic observations and interviews whereindividuals are enabled to discuss their feelings for their elders and the dilemmas theyface in day to day life. The complexity of families that include non-Chinese members,as discussed by Nehring and Wang, highlights the different cultural norms of filial ex-pectations and practices which pose interesting and unpredictable challenges unlikelyto be revealed by survey data.These papers also offer some conceptual advances and interventions into ongoingsociological debates. This is perhaps most obvious in Zhang’s paper where she arguesJackson and Liu The Journal of Chinese Sociology  (2017) 4:2 Page 3 of 5for bringing western sociological concepts such as practices of intimacy and displayingfamily into dialogue with Chinese concepts of xiao and mianzi, thus following in thefootsteps of others who have suggested that Chinese concepts may have broader socio-logical purchase (e.g., Qi 2014). All the papers, however, address the larger debates onprocesses of individualization and detraditionalization and their contested conse-quences for intimate relationships, which have been the subject of much debate in bothwestern and Asian contexts in recent decades (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002; Gross2005; Heaphy 2007; Yan 2009; Chang and Song 2010; Jamieson 2011). All the papersindicate that it is unwise to think of these processes as either linear or universal. It isclear that in Chinese society, as elsewhere, relationships with intimate others continueto be important in how individuals see themselves and their social obligations (see alsoLiu 2016b)2 ; and, rather than assuming a simple move away from traditional precepts,we should think perhaps of the ways in which traditions are reshaped and renegotiatedto meet new circumstances and the importance of material constraints for such modifi-cations (Jackson et al. 2013).The papers in this special issue all address, in various ways, how members of modernChinese families are negotiating changes in relationships between generations and theopportunities and constraints that face them. So what conclusions can we reach in thisspecial issue? We found that there is continued importance of filial piety but it hasbeen reconstructed and reworked under new conditions. Chinese families now lookvery different from those of 1949. Families have grown smaller with the decline in in-tergenerational co-residence and the impact of the one-child policy, but children andparents maintain close ties and exchanges of material, instrumental, and emotional sup-port. The Confucian family ideology which undergirded relations between elders andthe young, husbands and wives, has been shaken so that intergenerational relations aremore often based on mutuality than on obedience, but the practical need for familycare to compensate for inadequate social welfare ensures that filial piety is stillexpressed, albeit in a modified form. We also need to take account of the geographicaland economic constraints facing families when care for ill or disabled elders becomesnecessary. As Zhang’s study indicates, those who are relatively affluent can consider thepossibilities of hiring domestic help or paying for a private care home—even if the lat-ter proves problematic in terms of traditional filial norms. For poorer couples jugglingthe multiple demands of maintaining an adequate income, caring for their child or chil-dren and elders, a crisis in the life circumstances of their parents could prove close tounmanageable (see also Liu’s rural sample). Since traditional family practices havechanged, there is an urgent need for the state policy-makers to catch up with realityand take into consideration the diversified family forms and new family practices ratherthan take the Chinese family for granted and assume that families can always providecare for ageing relatives.Endnotes1Statistics are for life expectancy at birth as reported by the World Bank. Availableat http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.IN?locations = CN, Accessed 27/11/2016.2Liu (2016b) examines how the sociological concept of intimacy could be utilizedin studying the relationship between adult children and aging parents in China, an areaJackson and Liu The Journal of Chinese Sociology  (2017) 4:2 Page 4 of 5which has been predominantly located in an obligatory framework (embodied in filialpiety [xiao] and its newly modified form intergenerational contract). Liu reveals thatthe complex relations between intimacy and obligation are the product of local socio-economic circumstances and gender norms.Authors’ contributionsBoth authors read and approved the final manuscript.Competing interestsThe authors declare that they have no competing interests.Author details1Centre for Women’s Studies, University of York, York YO10 5DD, UK. 2SOAS China Institute, SOAS University of London,London WC1H 0XG, UK.Received: 8 December 2016 Accepted: 8 December 2016ReferencesBeck, U., and E. Beck-Gernsheim. 2002. Individualization: institutionalized individualism and its social and politicalconsequences. London: Sage.Chang, K.-S., and M.-Y. Song. 2010. The stranded individualizer under compressed modernity: South Korean women inindividualization without individualism. British Journal of Sociology 61(3): 539–564.China’s Ministry of Civil Affairs. 2016. 2015 Social Services Development Statistical Report. http://www.mca.gov.cn/article/sj/tjgb/201607/20160700001136.shtml. Accessed 1/10/2016. [in Chinese].Gross, N. 2005. The detraditionalization of intimacy reconsidered’. Sociological Theory 23(3): 268–311.Heaphy, Brian. 2007. Late modernity and social change: reconstructing social and personal life. London: Routledge.Hesketh, Therese, Li Lu, and Weixing Zhu. 2005. The effect of China’s one-child family policy after 25 years’. The NewEngland of Journal of Medicine. 353: 1171–1176.Jackson, S., P.S.Y. Ho, and J.N. Na. 2013. Reshaping tradition? Women negotiating the boundaries of tradition andmodernity in Hong Kong and British families’. The Sociological Review 61(4): 667–688.Joseph, A.E., and D.R. Phillips. 1999. Ageing in rural China: impacts of increasing diversity in family and communityresources’. 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Journal of Comparative Social Welfare 27(2): 123–131.Yan, Yunxiang. 2009. The Individualization of Chinese Society. Oxford: Berg.Submit your manuscript to a journal and beneﬁ t from:7 Convenient online submission7 Rigorous peer review7 Immediate publication on acceptance7 Open access: articles freely available online7 High visibility within the ﬁ eld7 Retaining the copyright to your article    Submit your next manuscript at 7 springeropen.comJackson and Liu The Journal of Chinese Sociology  (2017) 4:2 Page 5 of 5

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The Journal of Chinese Sociology

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The social context of ageing and intergenerational relationships in Chinese families

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