The kin and I

LIU CAIPING is a former maths teacher, now 71, who has lived alone in the western city of Xi’an since her husband died last year. The radio is her steadfast companion. Her eyesight is failing and she rarely goes out. Like many city residents, her former neighbours have scattered, and her two daughters are far away. When she can no longer cope on her own she will go to a nursing home, she says. That option remains extremely rare for old Chinese. And that highlights the problem: China is struggling to cope with a rapidly ageing society and a rising number of elderly people living by themselves.

For most of the past two millennia the family has been central to how Chinese have seen themselves—and the state has been seen as a family writ large. Filial piety was somewhere near the heart of a Confucian order regulating society, and the family was an extended, stable unit of several generations under one roof. A very common saying encapsulated it all: yang er fang lao—“raise children for your old age”.