Ageing parent care is complex for Chinese migrants

Ageing parent care is complex for Chinese migrants

Government policy changes in New Zealand and China are creating pressures for only child migrants from China who face difficult decisions juggling new lives with cultural expectations to care for ageing parents.

Dr Liangni Sally Liu, a lecturer in Massey University’s Chinese programme in the School of Humanities, says Chinese families are hampered by local policy restrictions on bringing elderly parents from home, as well as China’s revised legislation requiring children to visit parents more regularly or risk being sued.

In a three-year Marsden-funded study, titled Floating families? New Chinese migrants in New Zealand and their multi-generational families, Dr Liu takes these policy changes as a starting point for exploring the changing dynamics of New Zealand’s growing number of Chinese migrant families.

About half of New Zealand’s 171,411 Chinese residents were born in China, according to the 2013 Census, with many migrants and their parents making up a significant proportion of the country’s Chinese-born population.

New Zealand’s 2016 policy change has temporarily closed the Parent Category to receive any more applications. “Whether this category will be open again for applications is uncertain,” says Dr Liu.

NZ restrictions changing Chinese family practices

Chinese migrant families are, she says, under tremendous pressure because refusing to allow adult migrants to sponsor elderly parents to immigrate to New Zealand is akin to “rewriting traditional Chinese cultural practice and the family norm of unification.”

While some adult migrants bring their elderly parents here for retirement, others come to support their adult children’s career development by providing care for their grandchildren. In return, adult migrant children assume responsibility for supporting their parents when they are unable to live on their own.

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