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This paper is a contribution to the debate on how to make health-care services in the United Kingdom more responsive to the needs of older people who are members of recent immigrant groups. The focus is on the Chinese-origin elders, and the objective is to demonstrate their diverse migrant histories, cultural backgrounds and attitudes to both ' traditional ' and Western health-care practices. The underlying argument is that if National Health Service staff had a better understanding of the diversity of Chinese older people, this would make an important contribution to making the service more sensitive to their needs. To develop this argument, this paper carries out three main analytical tasks. The first is to discuss the range of strategies adopted by Chinese people in general and Chinese older people in particular to improve their health. The second is to study Chinese people's heritage of exploring different methods to organise health in response to foreign culture. The third considers the ways in which the sensitivity of British health-care services to the needs of ethnic-minority groups can be improved, with a focus on the culturagram instrument and procedure. Three contrasting examples are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with the ideological dimension of the New Dawn project. It focuses on two analytical tasks. The first is to show that this project is not an independent reform measure. Instead it is a part of a series of pro-market welfare-to-work programmes launched by the Government to tackle social exclusion. The second is concerned with the debate on the desirability of this project in reducing social exclusion. As the design of this project is heavily indebted to market values, it is highly supported by those analysts and policy-makers who stress the importance of the labour market in helping socially excluded groups achieve social inclusion but it receives criticisms from those analysts who question the ability of the private market in tackling social exclusion. By carrying out these two tasks, the paper raises our awareness of the fact that whether people support the New Dawn project or not reflects not only their judgment on the effectiveness of this project in meeting the needs of single parents and carers on the Comprehensive Social Security Assistance scheme but also their views on market ideologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.