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The concern of this paper is with the sexual division of care in Hong Kong, China, and mainland China. As will be seen in the later sections, women in China and Hong Kong are expected to take up far more caring responsibilities than men. The aim of this paper is to explore the extent to which the sexual division of domestic labour is influenced by traditional Chinese values and contemporary political and economic factors. Certainly an examination of the cultural factor sheds considerable light on the gender division of care. However, it is still not sufficient to help us understand the whole picture. Attention should also be paid to the political and economic factors. The state policy occupies a central role in reinforcing the social construction of caring relationships. To understand the social construction of women as carers in traditional Chinese society, it is necessary to study the nature of the family because most of the care-giving processes take place in the domestic sphere. Hong Kong is located on the south coast of China. Of the 6 million population, over 90% are Chinese. It is often seen by the world as a typical capitalist society.

Over the past few decades, there have been a number of studies on the positive and negative effects of social services on capitalism. They share a common conclusion that social services are in a contradictory relation to the economic and political development's capitalist states. Hence, alongside providing social services, it is common to find that capitalist states try to reduce the decommodifying effects of social services. Certainly, the effectiveness of this strategy in dealing with the economic and political programmes has been subject to controversy. There are two ideal approaches to curtailing the decommodifying effects of public housing services to provide public housing services as residual services and as commercial services. The first part is a discussion of what the Hong Kong Government considers to be the ideal approaches to reducing the decommodifying effects of public housing services--commercialization and residualization. The second part is a brief history of public housing services in Hong Kong, China. The third part discusses three assisted home purchase measures used by the government to reduce the decommodifying effects of public housing services and how they are related to the commercialization and residualization measure.