UC Irvine

This dissertation is an ethnography of how the privatization of eldercare transforms experiences of aging and dying in contemporary China. It contends that legal and financial planning reorganize eldercare by transforming uncertain late-life futures into responsibilities distributed across families, markets, and the state. Household risk management strategies such as estate planning, insurance coverage, and legal contracts redefine what it means to provide care by linking late-life well-being, household financial stability, and shifting institutional frameworks. Drawing on fourteen months of immersive fieldwork in Beijing during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, I trace the trajectories of older adults and their families as they navigate diverse spaces—including natal homes, nursing homes, legal consultation rooms, notary offices, financial-planning agencies, and hospice wards. In these varied settings, disparities in access to public care, coupled with anxieties about bodily decline, prompt older adults to reevaluate their care obligations. By analyzing their end-of-life planning practices, this dissertation demonstrates that China’s expanding financial and legal markets are actively reshaping ideas of “good life” and “good death” amid social and institutional uncertainty. As older adults anticipate bodily deterioration, dependency, and mortality, the future becomes embedded in the fabric of everyday family life—unfolding as a socially embedded process that is historically specific, economically contingent, and morally complex. Techniques such as insurance policies, property transfers, and legal documentation serve as tools for negotiating care, autonomy, and intergenerational obligation among kin. Through these practices, uncertain futures gain material and moral significance in the present, influencing resource distribution, inheritance, and perceptions of care responsibilities. In this light, estate planning emerges as a historically situated and morally charged landscape where older adults and their families anticipate, strategize, and sometimes defer possible futures—while the past continues to influence the “last mile of life” they can envision and prepare for.