Due to demographic developments, the number of immigrant families with older members is growing across Western Europe. Poised between the different approaches to care in their countries of origin and destination, such families are treading new ground as they negotiate support for older family members. Based on semi-structured interviews with 26 older and younger family members from 20 Turkish immigrant families in Denmark, this article investigates the broad variation in how these families approach caring for older people. At one end of the scale, some families (re)create a traditional Turkish approach to care in which three generations live together and the daughter-in-law is the main care provider. At the other end of the scale, some families follow the Danish approach in which families rely on public care provision. In between these two poles, many families devise a variety of care solutions for their older members that often rely on considerable support by family. Utilising Cati Coe's concept of care-scription, the analysis shows how families negotiate – and sometimes struggle over – who will shoulder which tasks. In the post-migration context, daughters-in-law are often able to retreat from their traditional role of care provider, which in turn increases expectations of daughters' care provisions. In Denmark, which is a relatively gender-equal society, Turkish daughters may seek to make their brothers take on a greater role in the provision of care for their parents, and in some families, the children also turn towards public care provisions to share the burden of parental care. Resistance from older parents may, however, short-circuit this strategy. Overall, the study points both to the difficulties faced by older immigrants with limited host-country language proficiency when utilising public European care provisions and to the complex and unsettled nature of care provisions in immigrant families in Europe today.

The rapidly ageing population and increasing care needs provide the rationale for care systems progressively shaped by a growing market in a global context. In China the approach to policy making, which has been largely experimental, has involved market-oriented reforms since the 1980s. While marketisation processes have been well studied in various European care systems, very little is known about their implementation in the Chinese context. Based on qualitative interviews with local government officials and care providers in Shanghai, this article discusses the Chinese policy process in the field of care for older people and the barriers to effective implementation. It investigates the experiment-based marketisation policy process, the power hierarchy and the lines of accountability of the state in the care field. Multi-layered barriers are identified in the market-oriented policy process. These include (1) inherent bureaucratic obstacles at practice level: reluctance to exercise discretionary power, administrative inefficiency, incoherence of care schemes and poor inter-department communication; and (2) complexities and failures at policy-making level: the infeasibility of policies, underestimation of operational capacity and inadequate involvement of practice knowledge. These findings have implications for balancing the efficiency, effectiveness and sustainability of care policies in an era of public service austerity.

From 1988 the Chinese Government pursued a policy of ‘small government, big society’. The policy was determined at the highest level and, after a pilot study in Hainan Province, was implemented vigorously in a series of political reforms. It was the chief political dimension of the economic restructuring which led from state ownership of enterprises to the so-called socialist market. Like its economic counterpart, it reflected China's adoption of neo-liberal ideology. The aims were to encourage both civil society and the private market to provide social welfare and, thereby, to restrict demands on public expenditure. However, it failed to realise these goals and was recently replaced by a more state oriented approach. The article discusses the Chinese big society project and, specifically, examines why it was introduced, what it consisted of, its impact on social welfare, the criticisms it attracted and its recent changes in nature. The article concludes by considering some possible lessons for the UK Coalition Governments’ big society project and any similar initiatives attempted in other countries.