Abstract
Abstract Policy legacies are an important factor explaining how, regardless of the nontraditional discourse, previously implemented laws and policies have greatly influenced the state of eldercare arrangements in both China and Taiwan. On the one hand, Taiwan has been shifting eldercare responsibilities from the family to the public through a series of social policy reforms fueled by political demands from the civil society since its democratic transition, whereas the Chinese Party-State enacted a series of filial laws in addition to reform policies, which inflated the demand and supply for familial care while at the same time impacting the development of institutional eldercare. While the issue often framed as the prevalence of filial culture in Chinese societies, this article argues, through a path dependency-based perspective, that legal provisions, policies and the structure of the political competition are largely responsible for shaping current eldercare arrangements on both sides of the strait.
Highlights
Why did two “culturally Chinese” societies develop such different care arrangements for the elderly? The provision of elder care, insofar as it currently represents a pressing issue in East Asian societies, has long been tied to cultural via free access payette and chien particularism
Unlike the proponents of the cultural variable, we posit that recent policy legacies— legal provisions, policies, and the structure of political competition—are largely responsible for shaping current eldercare arrangements on both sides of the strait
In addition to the two major political parties, the non-profit organisations and social welfare groups that had been working with local governments to provide care services started to form political alliances to influence political debates surrounding elder care
Summary
Why did two “culturally Chinese” societies develop such different care arrangements for the elderly? The provision of elder care, insofar as it currently represents a pressing issue in East Asian societies, has long been tied to cultural. Despite having been strongly criticised as cultural overshooting and even sometimes empirically disproven (Kim, 2010; Welzel, 2011), the notion of Asian values remains important in a variety of literature, such as democratisation, and probably the most important at the moment, the topic of welfare regimes and social policy (Abrahmason, 2016; Sung and Pascall, 2014; Lee and Chan, 2010) Such literature has existed before (Walker and Wong, 2005), it was more trying to define—in accordance with the Three Worlds indicators— “Asian welfare regimes” or even possibly “Confucian welfare.” these. Social policy and more sociology based literatures (focusing on welfare provision, and care provision) kept using some form of cultural based argument, sometimes pointing to a “Confucian” undertone, in order to explain general care provision, elder care, and even sometimes long-term and end-oflife care arrangements in several east Asian countries. In both cases, policy trajectories seem to account for their current situation, rather than, as others would put it, their shared cultural background
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