Welfare Cooperative Production of Community Care for ‘One Old and One Young’ in China: Practice, Dilemma, and Mutual Empowerment

ABSTRACT Many Chinese families are facing a caregiving crisis, where the spillover of risks causes internal family problems to evolve into broader social concerns. Since the community serves as the primary living environment, it acts as an optimal site to carry out caregiving activities. Based on a qualitative study in Northeast China, this article explores a welfare cooperative production model of community care for ‘one old and one young’. The findings indicate a rising demand for community care but with an insufficient supply, which has primarily resulted from family dysfunction where the double burden of overlapping needs for elderly and young care as well as work–family conflicts plunged families into caregiving crises, with risks spilling over into the community. However, constrained by limited autonomy and a lack of social trust, community care services encountered a bottleneck. The community in this study has searched out a welfare cooperative production model, including vertical empowerment and horizontal collaborative cooperation, which facilitates two key transitions: from government‐led governance to collaborative governance and from technical co‐production to value co‐creation. Nevertheless, in the later stages of cooperative production, the model faced issues of goal deviation and value co‐destruction, where the focus of teamwork shifted towards political propaganda, and the elderly care service station faced financial deficits. Moving forward, family‐centred care policies should be developed to achieve full life‐cycle development and enhance family resilience. Additionally, social work teams and digital technology should be introduced to empower the cooperative production and to ensure the stable provision of care services.