The political economy of senior care in China: theorising with Chinese feminisms
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores the political economy of eldercare labour and the gendered politics of care work in China. Building on insights from research conducted in 2016–17 in Shanghai, we argue that gendered regimes of productive and reproductive labour, processes of class formation and economic reforms articulate with a regime of differential urban citizenship rights – urban and rural hukou – in shaping and influencing the lived experience of paid eldercare workers. As a framework for understanding ‘who cares’ in local eldercare labour markets in China, we follow recent work interweaving social reproduction theory (SRT) and intersectionality. In conversation with those debates, we experiment with mobilising intersectionality alongside SRT as we explore these eldercare workers’ paths into the sector, but argue that attention to the Chinese context and Chinese feminist contributions can also transform SRT and intersectional approaches through historically and materially grounded analyses of evolving relations of exploitation and oppression. This approach enriches the feminist political economy of paid eldercare through attention to who is channelled into this work in one of the world’s largest, and fastest-ageing, economies.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| 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".