Chinese population policy has long been shown to be a highly productive site for generating new social categories to enable governance. The article employs the sociology of knowledge approach to discourse and focuses on two recently much-debated categories: “families who lost their only child” ( shidu jiating ) and “empty-nest elderly” ( kongchao laoren ). Here, population policies intersect with larger social trends and new family situations. I investigate how these groups are delineated in the academic discourse thus creating the objects for social policy interventions. This process is by no means free of contention since the definition of the underlying problem entails certain policy prescriptions to tackle the issue. I demonstrate how problematising these specific groups normalises an idealised form of intergenerational care that is aligned with the interests of the state but clashes with social realities in contemporary China.
Björn Alpermann (Tue,) studied this question.