Descending asymmetry in proximate, mobile and digital care: Chinese older people grandparenting across distance within China and overseas

This article juxtaposes cases of grandparents who provide care for their grandchildren in two broad types of migrant families: (1) families where some members have migrated from the Chinese countryside to larger cities and (2) families where some members have migrated from China to Australia. By examining the proximate, mobile and digital forms of their grandparenting care labour, this article demonstrates the surprising durability and stability of care repertoires across distance and class. Despite the great differences of their migration geographies and family resources, these families nonetheless all demonstrate remarkably similar repertoires of caregiving articulated with reference to similar cultural scripts. We argue that the mobility of family members both within China and across international borders transforms practices of intergenerational care, yet in both types of mobile family intergenerational care circulation is now predominantly characterized by descending asymmetry whereby grandparents provide more care than they receive. This finding also spotlights how migration, whether domestic or international, intensifies the seldom acknowledged costs that grandparents incur in taking on childcare, such as negative impacts on their earnings, comfort, leisure time and other relationships.