Cruel Interdependency: Rethinking Care, Dependency, and Relational Constraint through Young Carers in Contemporary China

• In Event: Families and the Care Crisis

Abstract

In recent decades, sociological research has increasingly examined ‘young carers’, children under eighteen who undertake significant caregiving responsibilities for ill or disabled family members. Existing scholarship has documented both vulnerability and resilience among young carers, yet caregiving relationships are often conceptualised through binary frameworks that emphasise either familial solidarity or structural exploitation. These approaches provide limited analytical space for understanding relational formations in which care is simultaneously sustaining and constraining, emotionally meaningful yet structurally depleting.

Drawing on fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork with young carers in contemporary China, this paper introduces the concept of cruel interdependency to theorise multidirectional caregiving relationships co-constructed by children and their families under conditions of welfare scarcity. Cruel interdependency refers to a relational configuration characterised by emotional intimacy, moral obligation, and shared survival strategies that bind family members together while generating depletion, constrained agency, and structural vulnerability. Care is experienced as morally inescapable and relationally indispensable: children provide care but are also cared for, and adult family members simultaneously depend on and feel conflicted about children’s contributions.

By reconceptualising dependency as dynamic, multidirectional, and emotionally embedded rather than hierarchical or unilateral, this framework contributes to family sociology and extends debates on moral economies of care, emotional labour, and intergenerational inequality. The paper argues that caregiving relationships cannot be adequately understood through binaries of solidarity versus exploitation; instead, cruel interdependency highlights how emotional attachment itself becomes a mechanism through which empowerment and constraint coexist. While grounded in contemporary China, the concept offers broader analytical insights into caregiving in contexts characterised by welfare retrenchment, familialisation of responsibility, and shifting intergenerational expectations.

Author

• Kefan Xue