The Research On China’s Rural Elderly Long-term Care Services Under Welfare Pluralism Perspective

With the rapid economic and social development and continuous improvement of people’s living standards, human life expectancy continues to increase. At the same time, human fertility rates continue to lower in the role of family planning policy and ideas, and the resulting aging is spreading worldwide. In the rapid aging trend, the pension and health care of the elderly faced with severe challenges, and the long-term care of disability elderly has become an important social issue. While China’s aging accompanied aging, empty nest trend, and also has the typical characteristics of aging upside down between urban and rural areas. In other words, degree of aging is more severe in rural areas than in urban, coupled with the low level of economic development and inadequate social security system, long-term care of the elderly in rural areas must be a huge social risk. The reality is that elderly long-term care services in rural areas is still in the initial stage, with huge long-term care needs of older incompatible, and most of the elderly in rural rely on family. However, miniaturization of modern rural family structure, change of intergenerational relationships as well as the lack of family care resources, led to the weakening of family pension function. As we know, the development of the rural pension institutions facing difficulties, and elderly community care model is ideally suited to China’s rural areas, but still is in its infancy. Therefore, it’s urgent to establish China’s rural elderly long-term care system to address the huge elderly care needs.Welfare pluralism theory produced in the context of developed countries suffered welfare crisis, and the key points lie in that the welfare main supply must be diverse, state provides a comprehensive welfare model must change to different sectors of society together to provide welfare model, and to resolve the welfare state crisis by the transformation from welfare state to welfare society. This theory has internal consistency with our government advocated development path of socialized pension services and social welfare diversified. In this paper, the author uses the theory of welfare pluralism perspective, and studies the issue on China’s rural elderly long-term care services. On the basis of clarifying the mode of the current elderly long-term care, the status of current long-term care of the elderly in rural areas were analyzed that family care is weakening but still dominant, institutional care faces many difficulties and develops slowly, while community care is in infancy and care services are imperfect. At the same time, the paper summarizes up the main problems of China’s rural elderly long-term care services, include inadequate laws and regulations, lack of funds and lack of human resources team.Based on the theory of welfare pluralism as well as our unique culture and characteristics of rural areas, the paper divides the main supply of welfare into:government (state), market, families, communities, the voluntary sector. Among them, the government is to play the role of policy, macro-coordination, financial investment and quality supervision, market is to provide products or services for profit, families and communities are the most important subjects to provide long-term care of the elderly, and voluntary sector is to provide non-profit product or service. On this basis, the paper builds up rural elderly long-term care system from seven parts covering policy and law, fund raising, human security, services content, assessment payments, service delivery, management and supervisor.