This blog post was originally published on the India-China Institute/The New School’s Pandemic Discourses blog.

COVID-19 has exacerbated the gendered impact of care work globally, but lessons can be learned from countries like China that have relied on community organizations for solutions.

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed a severe care crisis throughout the world. The measures to contain the infection – lockdown, social distancing, quarantine – severely disrupted activities crucial to the basic functioning of society from cooking to cleaning, childcare, elder care and more. The experience of China shows the critical role of the community in providing essential services.

Like in many other countries, women in China assume disproportionately more care responsibilities than men. With the care crisis intensified by the pandemic, women from different socioeconomic backgrounds were all significantly affected. Urban women mostly saw themselves shouldering more household chores when hiring domestic workers or seeking extra help from family members became impossible or difficult during the lockdown. As most female migrant workers are employed in the precarious informal sector, they had to endure job losses and economic hardship, in addition to extra childcare and household chores. Female healthcare professionals risked their health working on the frontline while having to bear the added mental stress of possibly carrying the virus and spreading it to family members.

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