Keep the Home Fires Burning: Qiang Grandmothers Forging Care Circuits in Migrant Households in China

Rural-to-urban migrant households in China grapple with providing adequate child care because of migrant workers’ precarious work conditions, limited access to public services, and the challenges of bringing their children to the cities where they work due to household registration ( hukou) rules. With increasing pressure to raise high-quality ( suzhi) children, nonmigrant grandmothers in rural homes struggle to cope with intensive childrearing expectations. With ethnographic research with rural Qiang migrant households, I identify the “care circuit” forged by the Qiang grandmothers to support urban migrant workers and their families when migrants confront dwindling incomes. Despite being labeled “backward” within the state’s population discourse, these grandmothers strategically prioritize income-generating agricultural work while adapting caregiving practices to balance immediate economic needs with the long-term goal of nurturing their grandchildren. Analyzing such grandmothering work uncovers complex gendered and intergenerational power dynamics surrounding intensive childrearing in migrant households and illuminates the negotiations that occur when the Qiang grandmothers assert their agency while coping with the demands of the state’s development policies and their families’ intensive childrearing expectations.