Aging

Glimpses into Care Work in Chinese Nursing Homes

June 6, 2020 by Shuang Lu Frost

Society for East Asian Anthropology
Zhe Yan
May 29, 2020

This piece is part of an SEAA series on “An Anthropology of Ethics in East Asia.” The articles examine how individuals cope with societal changes such as environmental crises, nationalism, economic development, and mobility through lens of everyday ethics.

My conversation with care manager Zhang, the woman supervising the care workers among whom I conducted my fieldwork, came to a halt when she said, “Most care workers are here because they have no better options. They could easily be migrant workers shining shoes on the street today, and just as easily come to work in a nursing home tomorrow if they wanted!” Although she was being dramatic, her remark is representative of widely held perceptions of care workers in China. Despite such a demeaning portrayal of care workers as dirty and unskilled laborers, their daily practice of care reveals an agency which empowers their work.

Public policies for eldercare in China have been predicated on the premise that up to 90 percent of older adults will be cared for at home. However, this scenario is challenged when aging people become physically reliant and cognitively dysfunctional. Social attitudes toward institutionalized care are becoming more favorable as it increasingly becomes clear that adult children can no longer provide direct care for their parents. When constant supervision and intensive care are needed, they are increasingly being sought in nursing homes.

The front desk of a nursing home in China — Image description: The picture showcases the front desk of a nursing home in China. The lobby is spacious, clean, and sparse. There is a waiting area in one corner. A receptionist is working at the desk, which has a Chinese character Fu (happiness) decorated on it.
Caption: Care workers have to document their completed care tasks as part of the standardization requirement before finishing their shift, but emotional care is almost impossible to calculate. Zhe Yan

Because of the incongruence between the burgeoning care needs of an aging population and prejudicial attitudes toward care work itself, it becomes necessary to examine how care workers exercise agency in performing their tasks while coping with the social stigma surrounding them. To illustrate care workers’ agency in navigating the demands of care work, I have identified a set of techniques they developed to achieve caring goals and remain committed to the welfare of residents. In short, care workers exercise agency through encounters both with residents and with each other. These include identity work for self-empowerment, emotional labor to engage and detach, and boundary work to categorize residents and their relatives.

Care workers realize self-empowerment by presenting a caring and professional self in order to counterbalance stigmatized portrayals of care work. Most care workers are either rural to urban migrant workers or urban workers who were laid off in the restructuring of state-owned enterprises. In both cases, during the years that China’s economy was rapidly being reformed, there was a lack of reemployment mechanisms to reintegrate these workers into the formal economy. Consequently, many entered the care sector, in which the level of skill necessary for employment was relatively low.

However, by narrating the meticulous and attentive care they deliver to elderly residents, and in contrast to the availability of immediate family members for direct caregiving, care workers are increasingly constructing a moral standing as fictive kin. But as articulated by care worker Lin, having an empathetic relationship with clients is not enough to provide good care: “Compassion alone is inadequate. Not many residents are happy to live here, but they have no other option. We need to understand their psychological state and provide needed comfort for both the elderly and their families so that they can slowly adjust to institutionalized care. It’s not as easy as you think!” Lin’s closing comment reveals the need for professionalism as well as the capacity for empathy in caring for a vulnerable aging population.

To improve the professionalization of care work, national policies encourage the skill advancement of care workers through training programs. Zuo, a certified care worker, said that she is upset to still be called ayi (auntie, a kinship term also used to refer to domestic helpers). She carefully maintains a distinctive boundary between a common helper in a family home and a certified care worker in a care facility. “It feels different when people address me by my professional title, huliyuan (care worker). It’s like we are being formally recognized as professionals, and not everyone can be a qualified and effective care worker!” Care workers’ professional identity and commitment to care processes help them to mitigate low status and navigate the monotony of the many unpleasant and mundane tasks of care work. Exercising autonomy through detachment shields care workers from escalating emotional tensions.

In addition to identity work for self-empowerment, care workers calibrate their emotional labor. While care workers must observe mandates of care, ethics, and moral guidelines in ensuring basic needs are met, they remain autonomous in emotional attachment. For example, care workers are more willing to work with residents who show gratitude and respect for their work. The rewarding aspects of care promote the formation of relationships and allow care workers to find meaning in their work (see Stacey 2005). Care workers also detach emotionally from care delivery when residents only consider them to be servants. Exercising autonomy through detachment shields care workers from escalating emotional tensions. Migrant care worker Xu explains, “I do what I can to help them with feeding, bathing, and toileting; all the basics. But if the relatives or the elderly residents are mean to me, I won’t spend extra time on them. If they don’t respect me and my work, why should I care?” In the daily practice of care, cultivating authentic emotions with residents can be challenging due to heavy workloads and chronic understaffing. Care is routinized and standardized, often dictating that care workers care for instead of care about their elderly clients. In this pressurized environment, care workers’ use of emotions individualizes routine care for elderly residents. By calibrating their emotional attachment in their caring processes, care workers are able to both maintain the energy needed to provide quality care and harness those energies to balance the competing interest of residents, their relatives, and the nursing home.

Emotional labor can also promote processes beyond the simple dyad of care worker and care recipient. It creates the space for care workers to reflect on their own impending need for eldercare and to renew their determination to remain in the eldercare sector. “Their today is our tomorrow!” is a saying reiterated many times by care workers as they think of what awaits them in old age. There is widespread concern about both the mushrooming cost of care and the ability of their own family to later provide care for them, as many care workers belong to the one-child generation. Catalyzed by these concerns, care workers can be more accepting and tolerant of the demanding aspects of care work because they hope that their current commitment to care will be rewarded in part by others caring for them in the future.

Photo of the interior of Chinese care facility — Image description: This room is the social space in a Chinese nursing home, including long tables and chairs. Some elderly residents are watching a Chinese period TV show on the projected screen. Some are sitting across from each other, chatting. Three care workers in blue suits are helping the elderly residents.
Caption: Care workers prepare the elderly residents for supper before dusk. Zhe Yan

Care workers also sometimes categorize residents and their relatives as possessing high or low suzhi (quality) (Yan 2003, Kipnis 2006). Care workers use this term to illustrate the degree of respect received from their clients. Through the boundary work of categorization, care workers create a buffer to counterbalance negative encounters with some residents who are demanding and unreasonable. This phenomenon is also reinforced by nursing homes’ organization of care work, which rotationally assigns residents and working shifts to care workers so that they interact with a large pool of residents over time. Care workers’ strategy to distinguish between high and low suzhi groups helps to ameliorate the impact of unpleasant individual encounters. With the construction of this agency, care workers regulate the environment for the performance of ongoing quality care.

Care workers apply a similar strategy to deal with residents’ relatives. Care workers consider some relatives’ visits to be sporadic and not very interactive, and so the emotional needs of their elderly residents are left unmet. In one extreme case, care worker Wang disdained the utilitarian intention of some relatives’ visits, claiming that they came only to reach the required number of visits to earn them a discount for care expenses from the nursing home. Combined with the disrespect they sometimes receive from relatives, care workers categorize some of these families as being of “low quality” and insulate themselves from unpleasant encounters without blaming themselves, the elderly, or the institution. Exercising agency through categorization is a viable strategy for care workers in some situations, but it also can mask deeper structural problems that need to be addressed. These include an absence of codes of conduct for families, codes of behavior for residents, and formal mechanisms for care workers to voice their concerns to management.

The many and sometimes competing demands of care work make it necessary for care workers to actively exercise agency to achieve caring goals and to guarantee care quality. The three modes of agency developed by care workers and identified in this essay—cultivating self-empowerment, calibrating emotional labor, and categorizing clients and relatives based on suzhi—sustain care workers’ agency in the performance of the full range of tasks required by the elderly in long-term care.

Zhe Yan is a doctoral candidate at University of Würzburg. His research delves into the experiences and social organization of care work in China, focusing on long-term care residential facilities. His research interests include aging and eldercare, and how processes of aging and care are shaped by socio-political conditions.

Cite as: Yan, Zhe. 2020. “Glimpses into Care Work in Chinese Nursing Homes.” Anthropology News website, May 29, 2020. DOI: 10.1111/AN.1409

Staging Harmony in China’s Urban Dance Competitions

May 14, 2019 by Shuang Lu Frost

At a recent government-sponsored dance competition for retirees in Chengdu, the capital of China’s Sichuan province, more than 20 groups of retired women took to the stage to perform a dance routine set to Kangding Qingge, a Chinese pop song with lyrics extolling the romance of the Tibetan grasslands. This competition, and others like it, was a colorful staging of social harmony belying a more complex picture beneath the surface.

**Women wearing Tibetan-style costumes purchased from Taobao while watching another dance group on stage.** Claudia Huang

Between 2015 and 2017, I spent 18 months in Chengdu, researching the collective dancing phenomenon. Attending competitions was part of my regular routine. When I arrived at this competition on a summer morning, I saw hundreds of retirees sitting together in what looked like a rainbow sea of lustrous polyester. I first approached a group of women dressed in flamingo pink robes with yellow and green embroidered trim. They were helping each other put on complicated headpieces consisting of plaited ribbons with beading directly over the forehead and long, thin black braids flowing from the back. They each wore red satin stockings over their shoes to mimic knee-high boots when seen from afar. Next to these flamingo-hued dancers sat another group in nearly identical getups, save the fact that theirs were sky-blue. Still another group rehearsed nearby in red robes with detachable long sleeves extending more than 12 inches past their fingertips and a slightly different version of the same headpiece. As each of the groups ascended the stage to perform the same routine in succession, these sleeves and the ubiquitous black braids created graceful shapes in the air as the women danced. Behind them on the stage, a large banner displayed the names of the competition’s sponsors, which included the China Sports Lottery, the municipal district government, the district elderly sports association, and the local district’s social work organization. These state institutions and the retired dancers do not share the same agenda, but dance competitions offer organizers and participants alike the opportunity to broadcast their respective messages for a wide audience.

In preparation for this competition, organizers informed participating groups three months in advance that they would be competing to Kangding Qingge, which gave them ample time to practice the official, pre-determined routine and to get their costumes in order. Like the song Kangding Qingge, these costumes are not so much Tibetan as they are Tibetan-esque.Although some elements like the long sleeves and thin braids do appear in traditional Tibetan dress, the outfits are haphazard amalgamations of customary attire from different Tibetan regions and social classes. When I asked the dancers—all belonging to the majority Han ethnic group—about the origins of what they were wearing, they invariably answered that they were purchased online. Indeed, dance costumes like these can be found on China’s mega online-retailer sites like Taobao for less than 100 RMB (about 15 USD). On these shopping websites, there is often a category dedicated to minzu wu (ethnic dance), organized by sub-categories such as Tibetan, Mongolian, Miao (Hmong), and Uighur. The costumes of each sub-category reference key elements of traditional dress from each minority nationality, such as elaborate silver headdresses for Miao outfits and cowboy hats for Mongolian ones.

Competitions like these have been taking place in China’s urban centers since the early 2000s, when retired and aging women as well as some men began dancing together in informal groups in the aftermath of massive layoffs and early retirements stemming from China’s State-Owned Enterprise (SOE) reforms. The vast majority of dance group participants belong to China’s so-called “Lost Generation.”. Many spent their youths surviving the brutal excesses of Mao Zedong’s political campaigns. Then, decades later when China was transforming into the world’s second largest economy, they were squeezed out of their jobs to make way for younger workers. By the 2015, there were over 100 million participants throughout China. They crowded parks and sidewalks, leading city residents to complain about the noise from the dancers’ music. As part of their larger efforts to regulate the burgeoning phenomenon, municipal and provincial governments began organizing competitions in order to bring the groups under official control. Today, publicly sponsored dance competitions between groups of retirees occur regularly in Chinese cities.

Dance group participants have no say in what to perform during competitions; selected pieces range from patriotic Chinese numbers to contemporary pop performances, all set to official choreography. That said, the fact that organizers chose Kangding Qingge is neither an accident nor an anomaly. I attended over 20 competitions during my fieldwork and “ethnic minority” dances featured in more than half of them. Tibetan dances were by far the most common, but there were also two Miao dances and a wintertime competition where groups performed a Uighur dance while wearing costumes trimmed with faux fur.

Identifying, categorizing, and codifying ethnic groups was one of the new Communist government’s first projects after the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. China now officially recognizes 56 ethnic groups including the majority Han. Since 1949, displays of national unity have prominently featured popular understandings of minority groups’ cultural heritage. While the state exerts tight controls over minority populations’ expressions of their own cultural practices, performances of minority songs and dances make regular appearances on state-run television programs. The idea that China is composed of 56 distinct but harmoniously co-existing ethnic groups remains a foundational tenet of the modern state. Nowhere was this more prominently displayed than during the opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympics, when 56 schoolchildren representing the 56 ethnic groups carried the Chinese flag into the stadium while wearing versions of traditional attire.

Dance competitions may lack the grandeur of these official spectacles, but the presence of state agendas is no less apparent. Competitions are invariably judged by a panel of government officials, sometimes with input from a professional dancer or choreographer. At the Kangding Qingge competition, the most senior official present was the district deputy party secretary, a visibly bored man in his 50s who struggled to conceal his lack of interest in the performances. For government representatives like him, dance competitions are public events where ideals—about active aging, the preservation of cultural traditions, and the existence of a unified multi-ethnic Chinese nation—can be communicated to the masses. At the conclusion of the Kangding Qingge competition, another local official gave a rousing speech on the beauty of Tibetan culture and exhorted the performers to work harder to perfect their routines in the future.

For the retired dancers, on the other hand, performing onstage in brightly-colored, attention-grabbing costumes offers a chance to be noticed again after a lifetime of being overlooked. Despite their shoddy construction and cheap materials, the costumes have an ostentatious beauty that is normally deemed immodest for retired women but is sanctioned during performance events such as these dance competitions. My 61-year-old friend Qiu, whom I met while conducting participant observation with a dance group, immediately named the outfits when I asked what she enjoyed most about the competitions. She said she loved the outfits for their brightness, and for the way they popped in photographs. “At our age,” she explained, “the only way to add color to our appearance is with clothing.” If the cultural insensitivity of the costumes ever gave them pause, the dancers did not voice it. After all, they would be just as happy performing a folk Chinese dance in traditional Han clothing. After the event concluded, the women gathered on the stage to pose for photos, taking care to display the colorful skirts and bright embroidery. For these retirees, dance competitions are performances of visibility.

Dance competitions that showcase happy elders dancing in Tibetan dress must be understood within this broader tradition of staging national and ethnic harmony. The boundaries of the modern Chinese state are asserted through this highly visible and officially sanctioned cultural phenomenon to emerge in recent years. At a time when scholars are (rightly) paying attention to the ways that the Chinese state manages minority cultures through economic incentives, intimidation, and force, we must also understand how majority attitudes toward minority groups are shaped and maintained through everyday events. The dancers may not even be aware that they are acting out a political narrative, but this is how dance competitions effectively mask underlying social tensions. The state and the dancers have their own agendas, but for a few brief hours, these dual performances converge onstage in aesthetic—if not ideological—harmony.

Claudia Huang is a doctoral candidate at UCLA. Her research interests include aging and retirement, kinship and families, and state-society relations. She will be joining the faculty of the Department of Human Development at California State University, Long Beach in fall 2019.

Please contact Shuang Frost (shuanglu@fas.harvard.edu) and Heidi Lam (heidi.lam@yale.edu) with your essay ideas and comments.

Cite as: Huang, Claudia. 2019. “Staging Harmony in China’s Urban Dance Competitions.” Anthropology News website, May 10, 2019. DOI: 10.1111/AN.1159