The future of the old is a matter of concern for Chinese families and for the government. Increasing life expectancy, a dearth of good pensions and the expense of health care mean that old people may be a drain on their families’ resources. While still fit, grandmothers are a great benefit to their families, but when they become frail they may be a burden. As their lives lengthen they are supported by fewer descendants than would have been the case in earlier times. The desire for longevity, even immortality, is deeply rooted in Chinese culture. Diet, medication, gentle exercise, prayer are all means to achieve longevity. There is a growing ‘silver market’ in China, to provide for the ederly, but retirement homes are not popular with old people and reflect poorly on a family.

COVID-19 has had a disastrous impact on the elderly in many countries. The impact in China is not known, though the virus seems to have done less damage in its country of origin than elsewhere.

Death has traditionally been regarded in China as something to be prepared for, not as something to be feared, a taboo subject. As age came on grandmothers prepared for their end. If the family did not have a graveyard they arranged a grave site. They had a coffin made, of the most expensive wood they could afford. They ordered a set of grave clothes. The set aside money for the funeral. The division of property was done by customs; wills were not legal documents but moral exhortations to descedents.

In the Mao Era most of these practices were considered feudal and outlawed, in favour of cremation without ceremony. In the Reform Era many have come back, though cremation is encouraged. The dead live on. In the past they joined the ancestors. Now the focus is on commemorating individuals. At the Qingming Festival families remember the dead and provide them with paper replicas of what they may need in the afterlife.

In a breach with tradition, neither of China’s twentieth-century leaders has been buried. Mao Zedong lies in the centre of Tiananmen Square. Chiang Kai-shek is in a coffin in Taoyuan (Taiwan), waiting to be buried in his home town.

Grandmothers were household managers. They assigned household duties to their daughters, daughters-in-law and, in wealthier households, servants. They supervised food prepartion for daily meals, and for storerooms. They directed the handcraft work that made households self-sufficient in clothing, bedding and shoes, and taught the younger women handcraft skills. In many parts of China handcrafted goods were produced in the home for the market, including for export. The sales brought in income for the family.

Grandmothers marshalled the preparations for family festivals, notably marriages, and for the many festivals that punctuated the year, most importantly the New Year, which demanded the attendance of the whole family. Grandmothers supervised the preparation of food, clothing and ritual items, for an occasion that cemented the family together. Family celebrations went into abeyance from 1937, through twelve years of war and during the Mao Era. They are now back in full force. Hundreds of millions go home in the run-up to the New Year. For labour migrants the two-week holiday is the only time they spend at home with their children.

Older Chinese women have been presented in particular, often flattering, ways. The status of matriarch gave them dominance in their household. The inner world of the family belonged to the matriarch, the external to her husband or son. Matriarchs could be rich or poor. The two dominant exemplars came from opposite ends of the social scale.The Lady Dowager ruled over a household of a thousand people. Liu Laolao was a peasant woman. Both ran their domains with love and care and, if necessary, strictness.

In traditional China women did not fear growing old. Their lives were getting better; they had survivced the miseries of their earlier lives. They wore sombre clothes, did not dye their hair or use make-up. They accepted their wrinkles as a sign of achievement, which it was when lifespans were short. They expected and received recognition and preferential treatment from their families. They took pride in the successes of their grandchildren and regared them as their own.

Matriarchs are figures of the past, their decline coinciding with the decline of multi-generational families and the rise in the status of younger women. They remain much-loved figures.

Writing this book has been a great pleasure. My admiration for the hard-working, devoted and loving grandmothers of China has grown and grown. Beyond this praise for their contributions, hard and fast conclusions are dangerous. I have been looking at a constantly changing scene. A recent example is the government’s proposal to raise the retirement age. The proposal has been met with open opposition, not from those about to retire but from the young who fear their mothers will be too old when they retire to care for their grandchildren.

The mutual love between grandmothers and grandchildren has been a strong bond at the heart of Chinese families. As grandmothers – which almost all women were – women came in to their own in their families. Fortunate ones became great-grandmothers, fulfilling the traditional ideal of ‘four generations under one roof’.

Grandmothers were the beneficiaries of Confucian respect for old age. This respect faltered in the Mao Era (1949–1976) but has been reinstated in the Reform Era (1980–present). Respect implies material support; China has limited pensions and health care is expensive. Many elderly people rely on their children for support, support required by law.

China–foreign comparisons are inevitable, and often welcomed by the Chinese state, which takes pride in Confucian values. Chinese grandmothers do more for their families than Western ones. Chinese parents put greater trust in the abilities of their own mothers in child care. The elderly in the West do not expect to be supported by their children. Beyond the differences, the love of grandmothers for their grandchildren is universal.

Grandmothers’ child care was/is loving and permissive. Infants and small children are caressed and fed on demand, and fall asleep in their grandmothers’ arms. They are seldom punished. Until recently they wore split pants, which took much of the drudgery out of child care: no nappies/diapers had to be changed – the child was simply held out over a suitable place.

The amount of child care given by grandmothers, always generous, has increased with time. From the start of the Mao Era young women have been expected to work outside the home. Some small children go to nurseries, and some are cared for by nannies, but the majority are cared for by their grandmothers, all day, all week, even for months on end. There is implicit trust that gradmothers are capable of this care, even the best people to give it.

The one huge exception to loving child care was that, until the early Republic (1911 on), grandmothers supervised the cruel binding of granddaughters’ feet. The practice, once considered necessary for a girl to make a good match, has long since been outlawed.

These two words are the ones most often used by grandmothers to describe their grandchildren. Until recently these were the children of thir sons; maternal grandmothers were not involved with their daughters’ children. The words express boundless love and joyful acceptance of devoting their lives to grandchildren. This is as true in the present, when women retire at fifty to care for their grandchildren, as it was in the past when women were often grandmothers in their forties.

There were great rewards for devotion, love and lifelong attachment to grandchildren. The love shows in the deep attachment of the Lady Dowager (Jia Mu) to her grandson Jia Baoyu, in the Dream of Red Mansions, and equally in the 2019 film The Farewell, whose director Lulu Wang and star Awkwafina were both raised by grandmothers.

The love and warmth of gradmonthers is contrasted to the stern discipline of ‘Tiger Mothers’.

In the Reform Era there has been a dramatic increase in the number of peasant children left behind in ‘villages with an empty heart’, missing the middle generation of a family. These are the children of hundreds of millions of migrant workers, who have left rural China to work in more developed areas. Residence restrictions (hukou) prevent them from taking children with them. As many as 70 million are left behiind at the moment, in the care of grandmothers. These women, without whom China’s economic boom would have been impossible, care for their grandchildren for fifty weeks of the year. The parents send money home, and may eventually return, but in the meantime for the grandmother caring for several grandchildren is hard.

Left-behind children do not have the educational advantages of urban children. Rural schools are poor; free education only goes up to junior middle school. Official pronouncements tend to be critical of grandparents for bringing up children ‘without culture’. The state is concerned that the children will grow up aware of their disadvantages, and may be difficult or even rebellious. In China’s history disadvantaged young men have turned into rebels; this includes many who joined the Communist Party.