Issues of Elder Care among Migrant Workers in Contemporary Rural China: Filial Piety Redefined from a Foucauldian Perspective

ABSTRACT

This article reports on research that explored rural migrant workers’ experiences of returning to their hometown to provide care for elderly parents diagnosed with cancer. The authors used a culturally integrated approach to Foucauldian discourse analysis to consider how 24 participants narrated their experiences of care in China. The discourse of care demonstrated a strong commitment to filial piety despite their unique care challenges, and this commitment was bolstered by discourses that emphasized how much parents had sacrificed, as well as by a persistent forgetting of experiences or background details that suggested any lack of parental sacrifice in recent Chinese history. Policy implications related to enhancing filial care are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Migrant workers
• filial piety
• care
• parental sacrifice
• forgetting
• parent-visiting law
• China

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was partially funded by Ministry of Education in China, Youth Project of Humanities and Social Sciences (project No.: 20XJC840001). This funder has no role in the research design, the writing of the article, or the decision to submit the article.