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Intergenerational support among widowed older adults in China

agreed that both sons and daughters should assist parents financially and take care of
aging parents (Deutsch, 2006).
To this point, no universal public pension program exists in China (Silverstein, Cong,
and Li, 2006), and the healthcare system remains poorly developed, especially in rural
areas. China’s state policy for decades has largely assigned the responsibility of elder
care to adult children and their spouses. Only for those older adults with no children,
no income, and no physical ability to work (so-called the “Three-No” older adults)
has the government stepped in and used public funds to establish an institutional care
system that covers the cost of services for food, healthcare, clothing, accommodation,
and funerals (known as the “Five-Guarantees”). Nevertheless, in contemporary China,
the “Three-No” population is very small, accounting for only 1%–2% of the older
population (Gu, Zhang, and Zeng, 2009). In sum, strong filial values coupled with the
lack of a nationwide social security system for older adults have placed a tremendous
amount of pressure on adult children to step in when one of their parents become
widowed.
As we could not find any prior studies focusing specifically on inter generational
support for widowed older adults in China, our literature review briefly discusses the
general literature on intergenerational support in old age. Intergenerational support
in old age can take different forms: coresidence, financial support, instrumental
support such as personal care and household help, and emotional support. In China,
coresidence of parents with adult children has been the primary means through
which aging parents’ material, physical, and emotional needs were met (Cooney and
Shi, 1999; Logan, Bian, and Bian, 1998; Silverstein, Cong, and Li, 2006; Treas and
Chen, 2000; Zimmer, 2005). Thus, parent-child coresidence is positively related to
intergenerational exchanges (Silverstein, Cong, and Li, 2006). Previous research in
China and Taiwan has found that intergenerational support is largely determined by the
aging parents’ needs as well as by child’s gender and the number of children (Lee and
Xiao, 1998; Lin, Goldman, Weinstein et al., 2006; Zhan and Montgomery, 2003).

1.1.1 Aging Parents’ Needs
Recent research in mainland China largely supports the needs-based transfer model,
which suggests that intergenerational transfers in late life are strongly associated with
the needs of the aging parents (Lee and Xiao, 1998). For example, in urban areas,
older adults who received retirement benefits were less likely to count on financial
assistance from their adult children than those who did not. In addition, older adults
who had achieved relatively higher educational attainment were less likely to receive
financial support from their children than their counterparts (Lee and Xiao, 1998).
More educated parents in urban China were also less likely to live with a married child
(Logan and Bian, 1999). Functional impairment of the older adults, particularly among
women, often positively relates to the likelihood of coresidence with children (Zimmer,
2005).
In addition, some key differences exist between widows and widowers in China.
Financially, widows are more disadvantaged than widowers. Widowhood for women
often means the loss of their main source of income, as a result of women’s lower
labor force participation rates compared to men. Widowers, by contrast, are often more
isolated and have lower levels of emotional connectedness with their adult children
than widows, as women tend to be kin-keepers in China (Jiang, Li, and Sánchez-
Barricarte, 2015; Liu, 2014).
Based on prior studies, we anticipate that widowed older adults with greater financial
and personal care needs are more likely to receive all types of intergenerational support
than those with fewer needs. Furthermore, widows are more likely than widowers to
receive intergenerational support.

1.1.2 Child’s Gender and Number of Children
Traditionally, sons have the obligation to care for their aging parents, but it is often
the daughters-in-law who provide daily living and personal care to the sons’ parents in

96 International Journal of Population Studies 2017, Volume 3, Issue 1