Ageing in rural China: Exploring the impact of rural-urban migration on familial support for older people

The challenge of population ageing in China is an emergent area of concern with significant implications as China enters into a period referred to as 'super ageing' (Joseph and Phillips 1999). By 2008 the number of people in China who were 60 or over had reached 159 million, comprising 12 per cent of the total population. Accelerated by economic reforms, a large scale migration of younger workers from rural to urban areas has taken place since the 1990s, which has geographically separated many adult children from their ageing parents and has posed significant challenges to traditional patterns of familial support to rural older people.
By focusing upon micro-level processes, the project will employ qualitative techniques to examine the impact of these socio-economic transitions on the experiences of older people in rural areas where two thirds of China's ageing population reside. Through life history interviews and in-depth studies of two rural villages, the project examines the extent to which rural-urban migration has reshaped expectations and experiences of familial support in old age and whether and how intergenerational/gender relations have been transformed by migration.