Young Carers in China

Abstract

Like adults, children also care. This thesis explores the lives of young carers – children who provide informal (unpaid) care to ill or disabled family members. While young carers have received growing attention in the Global North, this vulnerable population remains largely unrecognised, undefined, and unsupported in China. Based on 15 months of fieldwork with 30 young carer families in both rural and urban China, this study examines how children experience and navigate caregiving in contemporary Chinese families.

Findings show that young carers in China undertake a complex mix of tasks, including constant emotional labour not typically expected of children by adults. They also experience ongoing physical, emotional, educational, and social depletion, such that caregiving often constrains multiple aspects of their life opportunities. I argue that young carer families function as key sites of gender socialisation and the reproduction of inequality, with girls disproportionately burdened, an issue under-explored in global young carer literature. Although children in this study demonstrated autonomy in choosing or strategically negotiating their caregiving roles, their agency was often limited, conditional, and shaped by familial and cultural expectations.

Beyond documenting how caregiving shapes children’s lived experiences and futures, I develop the concept of cruel interdependency to conceptualise the relational dynamics within young carer families. Cruel interdependency refers to a multidirectional caregiving relationship co-constructed by children and their families. It is both depleting and empowering: it places significant burdens on children, yet also deepens familial bonds and embeds caregiving within a shared moral universe of love, obligation, suffering, and resilience. As such, this thesis contributes new empirical and conceptual insights to the global literature on care, and to the sociology of childhood and family in China.

The first paper of this project has been published in the British Journal of Sociology (Q1 Top).

Funding

This research has been generously supported by Lady Margaret Hall and the British Association for International and Comparative Education in recognition of academic excellence.

Side Projects

Alongside my doctoral research, I have published in Journal of Marriage and Family, Childhood, Current Sociology, Qualitative Inquiry, among other. I have also worked as a Research Assistant to Prof. Rachel Murphy, contributing to projects on family, intergenerational care, and technological change in contemporary Chinese families. I have also collaborated with the Vanke School of Public Health at Tsinghua University, where I co-authored several studies on young people’s and women’s health and wellbeing. These papers have been published in SSCI journals, including Qualitative Inquiry, Sex Education, Sexual and Reproductive Health Matters, Applied Research in Quality of Life, and Annals of General Psychiatry.

Please find my full publication list via Google Scholar.

Across these projects, I am committed to empirically driven and reflexive research that centres the everyday lives of children, caregivers, women, and families, especially those living at the margins of care and visibility.

For more information about my ongoing projects and publications, please visit my C.V. page.