Family Care, Development, and Health Communication in Rural China

Drawing upon the theoretical framework of the culture-centered approach, this book examines the conditions of care in the changing living environment of the elderly in rural China amid the economic transitions taking place in Chine since the 1970s. China’s development as a national economy is often acclaimed in popular as well as academic discourses, without questioning who contributes to the fruits of such development and who does and does not have access to it. With China moving into an aging society, studying the health of the elderly in rural families, who have been left behind while their adult children migrate to cities to work, offers a chance to understand the human costs of national development as well as challenging what health means for the study of health communication. This focus reveals health to have a much broader social connection than is usually acknowledged within the confines of the bio-medical model of health communication. Moreover, the analysis offered in the book attends to the broader structural features of economic transformations that constitute the contexts within which health meanings are negotiated.