Temporalities of Mundane Care and <i>Yangsheng</i> Practices Among Chinese Older Adults: Realising Collective Wellbeing

ABSTRACT While public health narratives often portray older people as potential burdens to society in the context of global population ageing, their care provisions are often undervalued. In China, older adults have been increasingly prompted to take responsibility for their health while caring for their adult children and grandchildren. Based on fieldwork with urban older adults who actively pursue yangsheng (life‐nurturing and health cultivation), this paper examines how these busy parents negotiate intersecting and sometimes conflicting temporalities to care for both themselves and intimate family members. While past forms of temporal reasoning in relation to care were heavily circumstanced by the political landscape, the older people are able to reclaim a subjective ownership of temporal orientation through yangsheng . We argue that temporalities of mundane care are embroiled in shifting personal relations within a family, which plays a central role in realising ‘collective wellbeing’ across generations in urban China. In addition to promoting personal health and thus delaying impending dependency in old age, yangsheng supports the wellbeing of the older people's families through their caregiving experiences informed by the life‐nurturing arts. Our analysis of yangsheng generates new insights into debates around care relationships and practices within the context of interdisciplinary ageing research. The paper also aims to contribute to constructing more nuanced and inclusive knowledge in the field of care and caring by highlighting the critical role of time and temporality in enabling or restricting manifold forms of valued lives.