Children of the State: Fostering in China’s Child Welfare Institution

• In Event: 50261 - Family Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 12: Family Making

Abstract

This article examines the consequences of the transformation of the welfare system in China, focusing on family fostering in the Child Welfare Institution (CWI). Different from U.S. and European countries, the fostering process is more intensively regulated and interfered with by the state and its affiliated institutions, which shapes the unique unequal power relationships of state, institution, and foster parents. The state mobilizes families to engage in fostering projects not only through economic subsidies but also by endowing them with reconfigured identities in the discourse of citizenship and creating unintentional opportunities for personal development, which affects foster parents’ perceptions of their fostering careers. By investigating a family fostering project of the government-run CWI in Western China, I show how the state incorporates families originally outside the welfare system, how it empowers their personal and familial development, provides them opportunities to elevate their sense of self-value while at the same time deprives them economically, cognitively, and emotionally. The family fostering system is embedded in historical and contemporary social inequality. On one side, it gives foster parents cultural toolkits and life experience opportunities to break through the class restrictions on their lifestyles; on the other side, it keeps them in the unchanged lower social class, with less income than equivalent jobs in the labor market. The contradiction and tension indicate the complicity of foster families and the welfare state by depicting the everyday dynamics in foster families, which offer implications for understanding the transforming welfare system in contemporary China.

Author

• Jianjun Li, Peking University