The One-Child Policy, Elder Care, and LGB Chinese: A Social Policy Explanation for Family Pressure

ABSTRACT

Lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) people in China consistently report family pressure as the greatest challenge they face in their daily lives. This problem has been explained primarily by highlighting sociocultural factors. While such explanations are important to understanding family pressure, they do not easily lead to actionable policy interventions to relieve it. This article suggests a new way of looking at family pressure by positing a social policy explanation. In particular, it reveals how both the one-child policy and elder care reforms have strong heteronormative biases that negatively and disproportionately affect LGB people, and it explores social policy interventions that may help address them. Beyond the China case, the article seeks to open up new avenues for research into how sexuality could be better accounted for in analyses of social policies and considered in broader discussions on defamilization and welfare state reform.

KEYWORDS:

• Family pressure
• social policy
• family planning
• elder care
• defamilization
• China

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Jessica Ng for research assistance, as well as Hartley Dean, Sonia Exley, Karen Fisher, Tiziana Leone, Berkay Ozcan, Isabel Shutes, and three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. This article also benefited from its presentation at the China Centre Seminar, University of Oxford.

Notes

¹. I use the term LGB for ease and simplicity in this article while recognizing that the community is diverse. I recognize that the experiences with family pressure, and the effect of the social policies discussed in this article, are not necessarily universal across the entire community. Bisexual men and women, for instance, likely face a different, more complicated set of pressures than gay men and lesbian women.

². While Friedman, Hechter, and Kreager (2008) countered that it makes little sense for grandparents to invest in grandchildren as they will not be around long enough to recoup the investment, the policy context in China where they have few other options would likely change this calculation.

³. See http://chinadaily.com.cn/html/feature/lifeafterloss (accessed March 18, 2016).

⁴. See http://www.npc.gov.cn/englishnpc/Constitution/2007-11/15/content_1372964.htm (accessed March 18, 2016).