Confucian care meets neoliberal logic in East Asia: how homeless services navigate cultural tensions in Taiwan

• This study looked at how services support people who are homeless in Taiwan. • Many services try to help people return to live with their family, rather than find their own home. • Workers believe this is a helpful way to support people. • Charities that provide support often have limited money and rely on donations. • These charities try to work together to improve services and speak up for change. The voluntary sector plays a central role in delivering homelessness services across Western and East Asian welfare regimes, albeit through distinct institutional arrangements and normative frameworks shaped by variegated neoliberalisation. In Western contexts, service delivery often occurs through strained state–voluntary partnerships, marked by post-welfarist retrenchment, minimal workfare policies, and post-revanchist mixes of care and control in cities. By contrast, East Asian regimes—exemplified by Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea—combine incremental welfare expansion with family-first provision, underpinned by Confucian care ethics and supplemented by workfare-oriented programmes. Yet, little is known of how this shapes homeless services within this context. Drawing on a qualitative case study of nine urban sites in Taiwan, involving interviews with organisational managers and service workers alongside participant observation in service hubs, this paper demonstrates how a hybrid model of homelessness services appears to be more supportive, yet remains intersected with punitive measures. This model blends the support of intergenerational care rooted in Confucian ethics with expectations of self-sufficiency that reflect neoliberal principles, while being shaped by local social policy dynamics and service workers’ everyday practices. The paper highlights how voluntary organisations and front-line service workers navigate this framework to sustain provision by reducing reliance on government funding, building networks within service hubs, and advocating for policy reforms. It contributes to geographical scholarship by extending debates on ambivalent poverty management and service hubs into the East Asian context, showing how voluntary-sector actors negotiate hybrid welfare arrangements shaped simultaneously by Confucian ethics and neoliberal principles.