ABSTRACT
China, often portrayed as an ageing giant due to policy-driven fertility decline and increasing life expectancy, is facing unprecedented challenges in the care of its fast-growing older population. Since its market-based reforms of the late 1970s, the country has experienced profound demographic and socio-economic transformations, most prominently marked by the shrinkage of family size and the upsurge of rural-to-urban migration. Both of these phenomena have gradually undermined and jeopardized the traditional role of the family as the principle care-providing unit for the aged. In an ambitious attempt to address the increasing demands of services for older people while balancing the growing disparity between formal and informal care, the central Chinese Government has launched a number of national-level policies to push forward a prodigious expansion of residential care services across the country. Though these are admirable efforts, they are established upon a fragmented health and social care system without recourse to a mature legal foundation based on human rights. As a result, residential care services in China are often poorly planned, lack regulation and governance, and fail to provide quality and dignified care to older people in need.
