Between state,market and family: Changing childcare policies in urban China and the implications for working mothers

Introduction

The reconciliation of paid work and childcare is an issue that confronts parents in all modern industrialized societies. However, the choices they make and the strategies they adopt are shaped by cultural expectations of gender, childhood and family life. They are also shaped by the social policies which determine the provision of childcare facilities. In China, the move from a collectivized planned economy towards a market economic system has reconfigured the management of childcare. Family and gendered cultural values pervade these changes and the example of pre-school childcare enables us to see the interrelation of public policy and private lives, of cultural and structural interactions and helps to explain limitations to the liberation of women in contemporary China. China is a particularly relevant country in which to consider these changes because there has been a bold and systematic attempt to shape gender equality at a public level. Huge transformations in family relationships in the private sphere have also taken place, but traditional attitudes about women’s responsibility for childcare continue to inhibit women’s equal participation in society and new intersections of gender, generation and income have emerged. This article aims to make a contribution to the understanding of women’s position in Chinese society through the analysis of changes in pre-school childcare provision and situating this within the wider perspective of gender relations. Managing work and care for mothers in urban China represents a critical pressure point in gender and generational relations.

The article considers first of all how debates about gender and social policy apply to a Chinese context. It then considers the development of public childcare policies in terms of three stages – the planned economy period, the shift to marketization through to the increasing intervention of social policies in the present period. Urban women with children below the age of seven (before entry into full-time elementary school) are the focus of this article because these are the people affected most acutely by such changes. The article then turns to the parallel changes in gendered and family relations. Finally, it addresses the strategies used by urban women to manage these pressures before looking at future considerations.

Shifting relations between state, market and family

Despite the vast literature on stratification and marketization in China and the fact that many have noted the negative impact on women’s position, a critical assessment of the role of gender and family in these developments is still needed (Ji et al., 2017). Gendered values are important for shaping society as they are embodied in the public sphere in terms of state policies and the labour market, on the one hand, but also in the private cultures of family life, on the other. The Chinese government has tried to shape these relationships in various ways over time and yet the aim of creating a ‘harmonious family and harmonious society’ cannot be realized without also addressing gender issues (He and Jiang, 2008: 4). In order to understand these developments we need to look at childcare practices as well as childcare policies. As Nee and Opper (2012) argue, it is through the activities and initiatives of daily life that institutional changes take place rather than just by grand designs of the state. It is therefore necessary to take account of not only policies by the Chinese government but also the everyday practices of parents managing work and care because it is at this level that gender relations are shaped (Abbott et al., 2013).

The structure of social welfare has been envisaged as an equilateral triangle with three dimensions: state, market and family (Evers, 1988). The relative importance of each of these dimensions has shifted over time and as one or the other becomes more important the relative roles of the others might change. For this reason, the triangle is never really equilateral as originally envisaged, especially in China. As will be shown, the family as the ‘residual’ dimension comes more or less into prominence over time in China too. ‘Residual’ here is taken to refer to the fact that the family tends to compensate for changes introduced in the state sectors and private markets that may have inadvertent consequences for society.

In using feminist critiques of gender relations developed in the West, we need to bear in mind the wider historical and social developments in Chinese society that make it different from a Western context. Not only are there different cultural traditions with respect to childhood and gender but also because gender relations have been explicitly included as an element of social and industrial policies to enact transformative change (Ji et al., 2017). However, this is what makes the persistence of gender inequalities especially interesting and in need of explanation.

This article develops an understanding of the relationship between public policies and private familial relations by showing how they interrelate and change over time in China. Building on debates about gender and social policy, we can see structural aspects of gender relations as embodied in social and labour market policies (Lewis, 1992), whilst the cultural norms and assumptions held by people regarding gender shape the gender arrangements in the family (Pfau-Effinger, 2004). However, these gender dimensions may not necessarily comfortably fit with one another. Norms and values often change faster than public policies (Inglehart and Norris, 2003) or vice versa, so that there can be a clash or accommodation between the two. At times the public policies included gendered ideologies explicitly laying down the conditions for women’s liberation through paid employment, and at other times by default, for example when they assume that the market will provide for childcare, and the family (with its gendered and generational division of labour) will compensate. These assumptions can have inadvertent consequences for the practices of private life.

These intersections apply to China in particular ways. The border between public and private sphere is described as ‘thin’ in Chinese society because of the history of the attempt to collectivize both of them (Ji et al., 2017). Chinese feminists have reacted in online articles to these changes: ‘To some extent, over the last thirty years, China has undergone an incomplete reversal from the public gender system to the private gender system. As a result, women have been attacked by patriarchy both in the public and the private sphere’ (see website Pengpai, 2016). Chinese feminists have also engaged with Western feminist debates by arguing that in China public and private patriarchy is not shaped by capitalism, as Walby (1989) suggested in her theorization of patriarchy as a universal institution, but rather by the patriarchal power of state-led institutional forces. These institutional forces nevertheless embody gendered norms about women’s position.

The developments in childcare policy can be mapped roughly into three phases based upon a reading of Chinese policy documents cited in this article. Private cultures of the family follow a different, yet parallel path of development that we shall address later. The first phase takes us from the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 through to the late 1970s. The main characteristic of this phase is that the state dominated both public and private spheres. The second phase covers the period from the 1980s until the early years of the twenty-first century when marketization started to take off. During this period with economic reforms and changes in the role of enterprises and the organization of employment, there was partial state withdrawal from both public and private spheres. The third phase stretches from roughly 2010 to the present and is characterized by the state using institutional arrangements to shape gender relations. Apart from the beginning of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, the periodization is roughly – rather than precisely – specified because changes were gradual rather than sharply defined and were regionally differentiated.

The focus is on urban childcare policies because rural areas in China reflect more traditional childcare arrangements built around the household and extended family (Honig and Hershatter, 1988). It is in urban areas that the clash between tradition and modernization and between public and private gendered relationships is most pronounced.

The public sphere: The development of childcare policies in China

The private sphere: Continuity and change in family cultures

Although we have called it a ‘residual category’ since it has not, for the most part, been subject to legislation per se but rather left to fill the gaps in public policy, the family has been important for the continuity of everyday social life. Whilst new family values have emerged, they evolve from older ones that we also need to take into account. The attempts to eradicate patriarchal relations during the foundation of the ‘New China’ after 1949 did not eradicate private patriarchy as it was still assumed that women would take primary responsibility for childcare and domestic tasks. In some ways the traditional family became cemented into the new social system and started to take on a new significance with the evolution of changes in the economic system towards a market society (Honig and Hershatter, 1988). Ji et al. (2017) call this the continuity of the ‘socialism-and-Confucian-patriarchy hybrid’ gender model.

The traditional family in China was a multi-generational unit held together by the notion of ‘filial piety’ (Chen et al., 2011; Stacey, 1983). This required younger generations to respect and care for older family members and to subordinate their needs to those of their elders. This was reinforced through patrilocal marriage arrangements which made the role of the daughter-in-law moving to the husband’s family the most subordinate one. These traditions were continued to some extent even into the 1990s when modern urban living had started to change gender and generational relations in important ways (Stockman, 2000). Nevertheless, the resilience of the domestic family has provided a basis of continuity and security during the many upheavals of the last 60 years.

However, the private patriarchy of the traditional family faced various challenges in the transformation of Chinese life since 1949 and this has meant that it too has evolved. The movement of young people to the towns, their rising educational levels and their growing economic autonomy served to challenge traditional assumptions. These trends towards increasing cultural and social individualization (Abbott et al., 2016) were further exacerbated by the one-child policy – all attention was focused upon fewer children within the family.

With the growing older population in China, women might need to take care of not only their children, but also parents, and their burdens have increased in terms of time, energy and financial needs. However, grandparents play a crucial role in childcare and domestic work. The limitations of pension provision indeed means that many grandparents live with their children and generational relations are still seen as a form of social security for both young and old. The preference for paternal grandparents to live with the young father’s family reflects traditional values of patrilocality but adds to tensions with daughters-in-law; educated and working women are no longer quite so prepared to accept their subordination (Logan and Bian, 1999; Stockman, 2000). Furthermore, both sets of grandparents are involved in providing for and helping the young couple, although young mothers might feel closer to their own mothers than to those of their husband.

The Chinese transition to a planned economy and the rapid social change that accompanied it after 1949 has resulted in stark generational differences. Whilst grandparents are less likely to be educated, more likely to have spent their lives in rural areas and hold ‘traditional’ views of childrearing, a very different younger generation has emerged with the rise of a new middle class (Nee, 1996). The younger generation of parents often challenge these assumptions, leading to disputes about childcare. These tensions are greater between mothers-in-law and their daughters-in-law than between mothers and daughters because the husband’s parents have traditionally seen themselves in a more privileged position, especially if there is a son. However, nowadays the relative position of the new mother in the family depends upon other wider family circumstances – such as whether the paternal or maternal grandparents donated the house in which they live and whether she earns sufficient income to make her own decisions. Hence, value change brought on by modernization more generally is reshaping attitudes to gender (Inglehart and Norris, 2003). However, these impacts are generationally specific. Shu and Zhu’s (2012) analysis of waves of the World Values Survey suggests that whilst some views about gender equality, including the expectation that women should work in the labour market, were shared by all generations of Chinese, others saw younger cohorts being more liberal in their attitudes (Shu and Zhu, 2012).

The shrinking number of children per family combined with the importance of familial continuity means that both sets of grandparents are focused on the children. Whilst in the past there was a special focus on male children, these traditional views are changing and daughters now too enjoy a privileged position that they did not hold previously. Hence, one (perhaps inadvertent) effect of demographic policy is to elevate the position of young women in the family.

Nevertheless, the pressures of private patriarchy undermine some of the progress made in public policy and the liberation of women in the New China. Women are under intense pressure to marry and have children before they become ‘left over’ (Hong Fincher, 2016). Women continue to be seen as the primary carers even at the same time as being full-time workers. However, their position in the labour market is lower than that of men; there is a large gender wage gap and women face prejudice as inferior workers (Attané, 2012). Although able to participate in public life, they are also less likely to be found in significant political offices. With labour market restructuring over the last three decades, women are more likely to become unemployed and their labour force participation has dropped from 84.3% in 1990 to 60.8% in 2010 (compared with 95.7% and 81.1% for men respectively) (Attané, 2012). Under these pressures it is no surprise that women drop out of the labour force to care for children full-time and one in five women are dependent on another family member compared with just one in 20 men, implying that gendered familial relations still determine the situation of women (Attané, 2012).

Yet there is evidence that egalitarian values have penetrated the Chinese family pervasively. A study carried out in the 1990s suggested that the division of domestic labour in Chinese families was far more equal (between men and women) than it was in Japan, the UK or the USA, although women were still mainly responsible for domestic chores (Stockman et al., 1995). This was reflected also in attitudes towards gender and work. Furthermore, the study found that the burden of domestic work for younger women was mitigated by grandparents, many of whom were co-resident. Therefore, private cultures of the family had been to some extent transformed alongside public policies, at least by this period. This suggests that theories of patriarchy developed in the West fail to take sufficient account of generational relations when considering China and elsewhere. However, Ji et al. (2017) suggest that gender relations are becoming more unequal in the recent period due to a resurgence of traditional patriarchal attitudes as a result of neoliberal ideology, which favours market forces over state intervention.

In order to understand the situation more clearly through the lens of pre-school childcare, we now turn in more detail to the provision of childcare resources in contemporary China and how parents’ decisions and strategies are shaped by them.

How do parents manage work and care in contemporary China?

State policies tend to be set as high-level goals rather than concrete policies, meaning that they are implemented in different ways in different regions and the different administrative bodies. Therefore, to understand their impact, we need to look at what is actually available to parents on the ground and how they manage their childcare strategies.

There are currently three types of childhood education in China: nurseries, kindergartens and pre-primary school following 98 days of paid maternity leave. However, most parents are not willing to let children below the age of three attend nurseries and this is especially the case for those below the age of two. Therefore, the percentage of children who enrolled in regular education programmes for children before the age of three in urban areas is usually less than 20% (Zhou, 2007).

What happens to the remainder? A high percentage of children stay at home until age three. This is where informal services become important as the majority of Chinese children are usually cared for by grandparents, relatives or a hired nanny. However, grandparents are not always available for these roles if they are too old, too frail or if they live far away in the countryside. They may also have more than one grandchild claiming their attention. As already pointed out, the involvement of grandparents is important but comes at a cost in the form of the balance of power in the family. It can foster tensions between different generations within Chinese families who can hold very different views on childrearing.

Under these conditions, nanny care is another way to help relieve young couples of the childcare burden. However, there are a lot of problems with this as well (Xinran, 2003). Nannies are often women with young children of their own or women who are unemployed and seeking to earn some extra money. Some nannies are employed by an agency called Jia Zheng Gong Si but this does not necessarily mean that the nanny has formal training either and the quality of the nanny depends upon the fees parents are prepared to pay. Other nannies are hired in the informal economy so there is no standardized or regulated provision of care. Even this is a cost that some families cannot afford.

Many middle class urban families do not trust the nannies to provide high enough quality care. These women are usually less educated and come from the countryside where more ‘traditional’ childcare practices are prevalent. Online forums report various alarming scandals associated with these practices including kidnapping, administration of sedatives and so on (Xinran, 2003). As a result, working mothers are always under stress during this period, which detracts from their work commitment. Hence, mothers are tempted to quit their job for few years to take care of their children, as is shown in the falling labour force participation rates of women.

Since childcare has to be purchased from the market by the family themselves, the inevitable result is that only high earners can afford high quality services. Therefore, family care is a common choice, with women – including the older generation of family members – taking on most of it (Liu et al., 2010). The family tensions that might arise from this include conflicts over the best ways to raise children. Older people might favour more traditional methods which prefer children to be quiet, obedient and rule-bound – indeed this is even seen as a complimentary way of describing children in China. By contrast, more modern methods of childrearing allow more freedom, expressiveness and autonomy to children. Furthermore, the intense pressure on children to perform well educationally, alongside the long hours worked by their parents, means that they spend long days locked into supplementary educational and other provision.

Although many nurseries and kindergartens have been leased or sold, there are still some kindergartens run by government agencies. These receive financial support from the government and are regarded as having a high teaching quality. Most importantly, they have a good reputation for providing security in terms of food and other aspects of the environment. Therefore, they are very attractive for young parents. However, they can only enrol a small number of children and are seldom open to those who do not belong to the respective work unit or school district.

Since public kindergartens can only provide limited space for children, they have developed a system of drawing lots to decide who can attend. This has led to the phenomenon of queuing known as Yao Hao. However, in order to qualify for Yao Hao in the first place, parents may need to buy a house in the relevant district, where prices reflect the desirability of different kindergartens.

The limited availability of places in public kindergartens has led to the development of private kindergartens to fill the gap. This is illustrated in Figure 1, which shows the steady increase in the number of kindergartens and the steady increase of private kindergartens at the same time.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Number of kindergartens in China (total vs private), 2006–2015.

In urban areas, with more than 90% of children enrolled in pre-school programmes (Zhou 2007), most were found in private kindergartens. However, this rapid and often unregulated expansion came at a price. Lack of supervision and security issues have become a topic of concern in recent years, especially for the cheaper establishments. The ratio of supervisors to children can be up to one to 30 and food provided can be poor or inadequate in some places. Since the quality of care depends upon how much parents can pay, there is increasing variability in provision, with those on low incomes having to resort to no or poor quality services whilst those who can afford it get better services (Zhang and Chen, 2011). In this way the stratification system is reflected in childcare provision and in the long run reproduces inequalities.

Furthermore, for parents whose children are in any kind of non-family care, there are problems with getting them there and back. The opening times of public kindergartens is usually from 08:00 to 16:50 and children should be collected by 17:30 in most cases. However, the work units in some cities might start at 08:30 and end at 17:30 or even later as overtime is common. Very long hours of work and overtime are normal in contemporary urban China and parents do not necessarily work in locations close to the kindergartens. Therefore, parents also have to pay for someone to bring their child to the kindergarten and collect them again. These kinds of services can be provided by informal nannies or by grandparents or other relatives. Especially in the holiday periods, parents have to turn to these additional sources of help.

Recent government circulars from 2019 have attempted to redress some of these problems with plans to incorporate the support of kindergartens into public services along with their regulation as part of the urban redevelopment of shanty towns and renovation of older urban areas. In terms of labour market policy they have proclaimed:

We think that family is the warmest environment for the growth of infants and young children . . . Our government encourages employers to flexibly arrange working hours, support the return of parents to employment and provide employment advice and training. ¹³

This set of assumptions in public policy aiming to support work–life balance addresses some of the problems of urban childcare but leaves patriarchal assumptions about gender roles unchallenged.

To sum up: the withdrawal of public collectivized childcare has been replaced by a combination of family care, private provision (at a high price) and various informal arrangements including the use of nannies or unregistered childminders. These vary between children aged 0–3 where informal arrangements are more common and those aged 3–6 when more formal public and private facilities become available. As elsewhere, families find strategies to manage these different resources depending on their income, their location and their residential circumstances (Abbott et al., 2013). Hence the shift from public to private provision and then towards a mixed economy of welfare is reflected in the realignment of gender roles in public and private spheres. However, it leaves childcare as a mainly family responsibility with the unchallenged assumption that women will have the main responsibility (maybe with help from the older generation if they are fortunate), thus detracting from their roles in public life.

Conclusions

The article has described the changes in childcare policy and how it has affected women in urban China in the shifts between state, market and family. The early stages of egalitarian liberation under the planned economy system was replaced by gradual marketization and the partial withdrawal of the state through to the more recent expanded role of the state in childcare policy. Finally, we have a mixed provision of childcare, split between formal (public and private) and informal systems of nannies, relatives and family care.

These transformations over time have resulted in new intersectionalities of gender, generation and income. Whilst the early policies aimed to universally liberate women from domestic exploitation, they failed to entirely challenge the culture that women were mainly responsible for domestic and reproductive work. Generational relations need to be built into this picture as the relationships between parents, children and grandparents form a critical part of the childcare strategies and represent the reinforcement of traditional cultures of the family. The period of marketization helped to reinforce the role of family as well as bringing inequalities based on income leading to a much more stratified system of childcare and social reproduction.

In this complex picture, what are the future directions for Chinese childcare policies? A number of possibilities can be identified.

First, the provision of public, high quality childcare available for all children would help to alleviate the pressures on women’s labour market participation and family budgets as well as ensuring the best possible start in life for children. This kind of service is provided by government agency kindergartens, but they are few and far between. The government aims to provide preschool education for all children for at least one year by 2020. In order to do this the government will need to increase investment and to define a reasonable proportion of educational funding for pre-school education, since at the moment the demand is substantially higher than the supply of places (Zeng, 2006). More basic kindergartens are needed and these should be of a standard to satisfy the requirements of parents and provide basic services to the public. This will not only help reduce the pressure on families, especially women in families, but also help to avoid the problem of unequal opportunities.

Second, the government is starting to recognize the role of fathers, which might be a way of addressing the issues of private patriarchy. According to ‘Population and Family Planning Regulations’ issued by local governments ¹⁴ statutory paternity leave is already being provided in 29 provinces and cities (Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu, Henan and Guizhou Provinces among others) for a period of between 7 days and one month, with 15 days being standard. There is substantial evidence to support the involvement of fathers for family relationships and benefiting the cognitive development of children (Hobson, 2002). However, it is not clear how much take up there is of these schemes given the work pressures Chinese families find themselves under.

Third, the Chinese government recognizes that it needs to strengthen the role of local communities in providing childcare for the under-threes by providing diverse services at the residential level. Although in recent years there have been some official calls to address this (see ‘Outline of Child Development 2001–2010’ ¹⁵ and ‘Outline of Child Development 2011–2020’), ¹⁶ recommending more comprehensive development of early childhood education, specific policy measures have not been proposed. As one author stated, ‘from the perspective of helping women to balance work and childcare better and improving the development of women, the government cannot ignore the demand for public pre-school for parents where both are working and cannot find suitable ways of looking after children’ (He and Jiang, 2008: 6). Therefore there is an urgent need to work out a combination of policies to improve the care system for children under three.

Fourth, it is necessary to better regulate the private kindergartens and nurseries. Private kindergartens are still the important supplement of childcare but they are profit-oriented and it is difficult for local governments to monitor their quality. Therefore the government needs to strengthen the standardization and supervision of the existing early childhood education market. In this way they can more effectively protect the health and safety of children. In addition, there is discussion about more direct government procurement of pre-school education services as well as encouraging more successful work units to establish kindergartens once again (Wang and Wang, 2011). This regulation should be extended to the regulation of informal care providers such as ‘nannies’.

These proposals suggest that at least some of the problems of childcare are recognized by the Chinese government. However, the persistence of patriarchal assumptions which assign childcare to women and the private sphere mean that the early promises of women’s liberation will not be realized. Rather, urban Chinese women face many of the same problems of managing work and childcare found in Western capitalist economies, whilst the current clampdown on critical voices means that many of the feminist commentaries that we have referred to have been silenced.