A Textual Analysis of China's Mutual-Aid Elderly Care Policies from the Perspective of Policy Tools

Mutual-aid elderly care, as a low-cost and highly socially beneficial model, provides an important approach to addressing the supply-side challenges in China's elderly care services. Based on the two dimensions of policy tools and mutual-aid elderly care service content, this study conducts coding and quantitative analysis of 51 national-level mutual-aid elderly care policy documents issued between 2011 and 2026. The findings reveal that: current policy documents are primarily issued in the form of notices and opinions, lacking corresponding laws and regulations; the internal utilization structure of policy tools is unbalanced, with environment-oriented policy tools accounting for the highest proportion, supply-oriented policy tools taking second place, and demand-oriented policy tools being the weakest; the content of mutual-aid elderly care services is highly concentrated on the dimension of daily living assistance, while dimensions such as health care, spiritual consolation, and cultural entertainment account for a severely insufficient proportion; and the cross-matching effect between policy tools and the content dimensions of mutual-aid elderly care services is suboptimal. Therefore, it is necessary to strengthen top-level policy design to enhance policy standardization and binding force; optimize the allocation structure of policy tools to enable synergistic efforts among the three types; and expand the content of mutual-aid elderly care services to respond to multidimensional elderly care needs, thereby promoting the sustainable development of the mutual-aid elderly care model.