IntroductionChina has limited formal care services and weak unpaid informal care support for older people, which has caused a care service shortage for them. Voluntary community care services are thus a type of formal care service that aims to meet older people's unmet care needs. However, the continuity of such voluntary community care services is important for the degree to which these unmet care needs of older people can be satisfied. Therefore, this study examines what motivates volunteers to provide voluntary community care services for older people in China. It argues that providing continuous voluntary community care services can be motivated by the interaction of volunteers' internal and external motivations.MethodsThis study employs the grounded theory approach, including open coding, axial coding, selective coding, and saturation testing, and derives the data from 15 semi-structured interviews with volunteers from September to December 2021 in Wuhu, China.ResultsThe analysis identifies three internal motivations (altruism, social interaction, and self-fulfillment) and three external motivations (social support, standardized management, and relevant benefits) as well as the interaction between them as factors that impact volunteers' willingness to offer continuous voluntary community care services for older people.DiscussionThe study's findings highlight the impact of continuous volunteering on society, which is significant to provide voluntary community care services for older people. It thus contributes to the development of China's care policy and future care supply services as well as serves as a reference for care development models in other welfare states, particularly in places where both formal and informal care are underdeveloped such as China.

Rapid demographic ageing constitutes a significant challenge for the Chinese social system. As China has only recently begun developing a long‐term care (LTC) policy, care provision is currently based on family care. However, the prevalence of such care is declining due to low social recognition and conflicts between family members' care and work responsibilities. Thus, a comprehensive LTC policy should expand extra‐familial care services and make family care attractive. Germany's LTC insurance is an example of a policy that integrates extra‐familial and family care. This study analyses whether China's LTC policy can gain insights from Germany's LTC policy in view of the findings from Chinese LTC pilot projects. We argue that a policy that supports extra‐familial and family care would facilitate the LTC provision preferred by older people, while also supporting relatives who wish to provide care according to their values of intergenerational solidarity.

Background: This study explores how the services provided by different types of Chinese communities varied in their impact on the social involvement of their residents during the COVID-19 pandemic. Previous research has shown that services in traditional Chinese communities have supported pandemic governance because of their human resource advantages. However, we argue that the services provided by intelligent communities not only adhered to COVID-19 pandemic governance but also promoted the social involvement of the residents.Methods: Using a case study approach of the intelligent community Fang Xing and the traditional community Qili Tang, both located in Hefei city in Anhui, China, this article compares traditional and intelligent Chinese community services. We conducted 42 in-person interviews (21 residents, 10 volunteers, 11 staff members), 30 telephone interviews (10 residents, 10 volunteers, 10 staff members), and 50 online video interviews (30 residents, 10 volunteers, 10 staff members) from June to August 2020.Results: The findings suggest that while the traditional community decreased its residents’ social involvement by restricting certain services during the pandemic, the intelligent community was able to apply COVID-19 governance measures without restricting its residents’ social involvement. In the traditional community, family members were obliged to take responsibility for daily living services and family care tasks. This community often responded slowly when providing required services compared to intelligent communities. The intelligent community contributed greatly to its residents’ social involvement in the process of pandemic governance. It offered an attractive option for residents to act as community service managers and prepared its residents for local-level pandemic governance.Conclusions: This study provides a better understanding of the relationship between community services and residents’ social involvement in terms of the different dimensions of community services. The intelligent community model can act as a reference for international community development during health emergencies.

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This article studies the Ming-Qing period (1368–1911), examining the differences in the poverty risks of Chinese women in various social positions after their husbands or fathers had died based on historical records and archives. We argue that women's poverty risks depended not only on their family's wealth but also on their social positions, which regulated their eligibility for various income sources such as dowry, family property, and assistance from their lineage or the government. Unlike most studies, we focus on the combination of various income sources for which women were eligible, via which they evaded poverty to different degrees.