Education of values: Marketizing the aging population in urban China is the first article I have published in an academic journal; it is also a chapter from my dissertation. In this article, I discuss the social function and meaning of elderly care marketing and sales work. This article is also an attempt to talk about what we mean by “social changes.” Social scientists like to talk about social changes, but when they do so, they often speak as if social changes are something to be observed only after the changes have happened. (In other words, it can only be observed retrospectively.) But changes don’t just happen automatically. For example, if you open an academic article, a policy document, or any somewhat formal discussion, you would likely read something along the lines that, as China’s economy rapidly grow, Chinese people’s perception of family A great part of work in marketing and sales that I observed was to actively make larger changes. people’s (rather negative) perception of nursing homes and explain why professional caregiving could actually be better than family care.
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Abstract:
In this article, I examine some of the marketing and sales strategies at Gardenview, a newly established eldercare company that ran a few residential eldercare facilities in Nanjing, China. There, like elsewhere in urban China, the projected aging demography was mobilized to push for industrialization (chanyehua)—marketization and professionalization—of eldercare, transforming ideas and experience of eldercare by putting forward a new set of knowledge of aging. To this end, I first ground the rising eldercare industry in the transitioning paradigm of conceptualizing China’s population from population control to demographic aging. Then I explore ethnographically how Gardenview participated in the eldercare industry in a rapidly aging China. In particular, I look at the floorplans and the marketing stories as devices of the education of values—as prices, the good and desirable, and differentiators—to understand the social, economic, and ethical dynamics instigated by a transitioning demography. These values, as I show, are crucial in linking everyday life and choices with the paradigmatic shift of China’s population. Finally, I discuss how understanding the very processes of marketing and sales as an education of values could shed further light on what anthropologist Michael Fischer calls “literacies of the future” as a socially and economically elaborated and contested world of an aging China.