‘I still can’t really leave this place’: extended care among care-experienced disabled young adults in China

Young people with disabilities remain largely overlooked in out-of-home-care literature, particularly in non-Western institutional contexts. Drawing on six qualitative interviews with care-experienced disabled young adults in mainland China, this article examines how extended care is practised and experienced in the transition to adulthood. Using a narrative-informed reflexive thematic analysis, it argues that extended care is not simply a delayed exit from care, but a broader set of institutional arrangements through which adult lives are protected, deferred and channelled. Continued institutional attachment functioned as protection against insecure exit, as conditional inclusion through institution-based work, and as a gendered and housing-dependent route of departure in which marriage was more available to some women than to men. In doing so, it shifts attention away from individualised accounts of dependency and towards the disabling social conditions that shape unequal transitions out of care.