“Who Should Care for Our Parents?” How the Perceived Achievement Hierarchy Complicates Transnational Family Relations in China?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article offers the concept of an “achievement hierarchy”—the symbolic meanings that families attach to siblings’ ability to convert education into professional accomplishments across borders—to examine how adult children caring for left-behind parents position themselves vis-à-vis their emigrant brothers and sisters. We argue that respondents’ characterization of siblings’ migration trajectories significantly shapes the dynamics within global care chains. Based on 95 qualitative interviews with family caregivers, our analysis delineates three scenarios where respondents manage a perceived achievement hierarchy in the context of long-distance eldercare: (1) hierarchical transfer, (2) contested sibling hierarchy, and (3) hierarchical collaboration. Many respondents believe that an achievement hierarchy among siblings paves the way for slotting them into a less desirable node in the global care chain. By contrast, some emphasize their status as the moral head of their family or China's global rise to challenge the family's symbolic distinctions. Others develop a collaborative relationship with emigrant siblings to care for parents at home, but this collaboration can either strengthen or soften the perceived achievement hierarchy between siblings. Our analysis shows that the pathways of emigration—as student, labor, and marriage migrants—mediate at-home caregivers’ feelings, emotions, and identities during family life transitions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".