Can ‘distant water … quench the instant thirst’? The renegotiation of familial support in rural China in the face of extensive out migration

• This article examines the impact of migration on elder support in Chinese rural families, how support is being renegotiated and the implications this holds for growing older.
• It reveals the existence of contested, negotiated and sometimes conflicting perspectives on support in Chinese families as well as its highly gendered implications.
• Parents strategically repositioned their claims for support, using the limited resources at their disposal – to lighten the burden on their children and strategically defer their claims.
• Little evidence was found to substantiate claims that changes in elder support are compensated by remittances and improved quality of life for older parents.
• The gendered implications of the stepping-up of grandparenting results in older women largely carrying the ‘double burden’ (farm and domestic/care) with serious implications for growing older.

This article addresses debates on modernisation, ageing and intergenerational support in developing/emerging economies. By examining the impact of rural to urban migration on elder support in Chinese rural families, it examines how support is being renegotiated and the implications this holds for experiences of growing older. It is positioned critically within the Chinese rural families literature, both drawing on research that reveals the continued influence of familial culture (Silverstein 2009; Lin and Yi 2011, 2013; Guo, Chi and Silverstein 2011) while arguing that this research has under-examined the strain this places on rural families, emerging conflicts and the potentially negative implications for gender and ageing. A gendered intergenerational lens is adopted to examine how generations experience and interpret these changes in the form and delivery of intergenerational support. The article focuses on the experiences and lives of the older parents, and older women in particular, to address some of the oversights in existing literature.