Education of values: Marketizing the aging population in urban China

Yifan Wang

doi:10.5195/aa.2021.305

Abstract

In this article, I examine some of the marketing and sales strategies at Gardenview, a newly established eldercare company that ran a few residential eldercare facilities in Nanjing, China. There, like elsewhere in urban China, the projected aging demography was mobilized to push for an industrialization (chanyehua)—marketization and professionalization—of eldercare, transforming ideas and experience of eldercare by putting forward a new set of knowledge of aging. To this end, I first ground the rising eldercare industry in the transitioning paradigm of conceptualizing China’s population from population control to demographic aging. Then I explore ethnographically how Gardenview participated in the eldercare industry in a rapidly aging China. In particular, I look at the floorplans and the marketing stories as devices of the education of values—as prices, the good and desirable, and differentiators—to understand the social, economic, and ethical dynamics instigated by a transitioning demography. These values, as I show, are crucial in linking everyday life and choices with the paradigmatic shift of China’s population. Finally, I discuss how understanding the very processes of marketing and sales as an education of values could shed further light on what anthropologist Michael Fischer calls “literacies of the future” as a socially and economically elaborated and contested world of an aging China.

Highlights

In May 2018, not long after settling in the city of Nanjing for a short research trip, I came across a poster of a campus recruitment event by a corporation known for its real estate enterprise
By foregrounding the temporality of demographic transition—that is, by noting that demography entails the present and the viability of the future—Tian Xueyuan presented birth planning policies as a social mathematics that games with time, addressing the policies as only a temporary and imperfect but manageable experiment that tackles the imperative of “reducing natural birth rate.”4 In particular, he argued that aging was a problem in Europe only because of the resulting labor shortage and the burden of “social labor,” both of which he dismissed in the context of China
In Xiao Lu’s daily work, sales involved the major work of convincing— by making explicit the whole set of eldercare ideologies embedded in the floorplan, and by assuring potential clients that the floorplan was good for the older residents

Summary

Introduction

In May 2018, not long after settling in the city of Nanjing for a short research trip, I came across a poster of a campus recruitment event by a corporation known for its real estate enterprise. By foregrounding the temporality of demographic transition—that is, by noting that demography entails the present and the viability of the future—Tian Xueyuan presented birth planning policies as a social mathematics that games with time, addressing the policies as only a temporary and imperfect but manageable experiment that tackles the imperative of “reducing natural birth rate.” In particular, he argued that aging was a problem in Europe only because of the resulting labor shortage and the burden of “social labor,” (meaning, the labor of eldercare) both of which he dismissed in the context of China When it comes to labor shortages, Tian believed China’s billion-plus population— compared to the few millions in most European countries—coupled with technoscientific development in the long run would ease China’s transition to an aging society. Corporate actors have kept close track of the constant modifications in local and national policies while actively forming industrial alliances to advocate their interests, coming to shape a future of aging by drawing the landscape of eldercare

A Floorplan of Care

Findings

Conclusion