Filial Piety and China’s Eldercare Market Opportunity

     Few issues are more critical to determining the success or failure of eldercare businesses in China than the role of filial piety in Chinese culture.  In a historical sense, the pressing cultural reality that many Chinese will not be able to provide the same sort of in-home care for their parents as the generation before did for their own means the norm in this area is going to change.  This question is one of the most critical potential fatal flaws I have written about on the blog as well as in a recent Asia Times column.  While researching the question I ran into the October 2011 International Journal of Social Welfare and their journal articles on what they call the “Intergenerational Family Support for Chinese Older Adults.”  Edited by Iris Chi and Merril Silverstein at the University of South Carolina, the journal was made available to me by Ling Xu at USC (thank you!).

In the opening editorial, Iris Chi notes that in this journal they want to look at what Chi calls the “… striking societal features that make China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong unique in terms of the challenges imposed and responses necessitated by rapid social change and its impact on older people.  These features – which include accelerated population aging and fertility reduction, possibly declines in the strength of filial piety, exaggerated urban-rural differences, and limited availability of formal services – have direct implications for the adequacy of family support systems, and ultimate, for the well-being of older adults.”

Certain elements of the journal articles highlight findings that may seem obvious but on further examination draw out an important point:  the article by Zhen Cong and Merril Silvertstein makes note that elderly parents who would be characterized as depressed also tend to be those who had “reduced financial, instrument, and emotional support from sons, but not from daughters.”  This seems to reinforce what the authors call the “patrilineal family system” that stresses the role of the son in providing care for elderly parents.  They make note that the “reduced availability of sons and increased accessibility of daughters have challenged traditional beliefs in sons’ exclusive obligations.”  These are the sort of adjustments to cultural expectations that Western eldercare operators need to see occur in order for a service model to take root in China.

Later in the journal, Weiyu Mao and Iris Chi turn their attention more explicitly to the question of how elderly parents perceive the obligation their children have to take care of them in their old age.  As the authors acknowledge, “filial piety, or xiao … has contributed to different generations connected and has led to an inherent sense of obligation for children to support their parents in the changing Chinese context.”

Again, here the initial finding is no surprise:  “With respect to coresidence status, not living with children was related to less satisfaction with the support provided by children among older adults.”  Ultimately, what Mao and Chi found in their analysis was that co-residence – while important – was not the most important factor in determining happiness of elderly parents.  Was it important?  Yes.  But what was perceived as acceptable was “financial assistance from adult children to institutionalized older adults”.

What does all this mean to western eldercare operators?  It is empirical evidence that China’s cultural expectations in the area of filial piety are changing.  Coupled to this is the realization that the country as a whole is prepared to address a problem it acknowledges it has – how to provide care for elderly parents given the often mentioned 4:2:1 problem – in what would be called non-traditional ways.  This is very good news for western eldercare operators and is, as you might suspect, a green light for further investment.