The state-led reproductive boundary: Divisions and income disparity in mainland China's paid care work

This study examines how the state and the market shape income divisions among paid care workers in China's domestic service economy. We develop the concept of the state-led reproductive boundary to examine how state intervention, through certification, training, work arrangement, and long-term care insurance, redraws the lines along which reproductive labour is valued, financed, and protected. Drawing on a 2021 survey of 919 domestic workers in Shanghai, the first Chinese city to implement a municipality-wide long-term care insurance scheme, we distinguish maternity-infant care, eldercare, and non-nurturant work, and model both monthly and hourly income. We compare a purely cultural account of care valuation with one that incorporates the state. Cultural valuation alone cannot explain the wage divisions within paid care. The division between nurturant and non-nurturant work in China is organised less through race than through human capital, certification, and market recognition. Within nurturant work, the maternity-infant care advantage holds in monthly but not hourly terms, since live-in arrangements obscure the low hourly returns of feminised, time-intensive care. The culturally anticipated eldercare penalty does not materialise. Eldercare workers absorbed into the hourly-priced, state-financed insurance scheme are no longer disadvantaged relative to non-nurturant workers, showing that state intervention can partially insulate a culturally devalued form of care from market discounting.