Paper short abstract:

This paper traces the socio-cultural origins of end-of-life care and their implication with health policy in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore, where their development is influenced by geo-climatic characteristics and various modernity experiences, primarily the bio-medicalization of end-of-life agenda.

Paper long abstract:

This paper compares the thanapolitics and their socio-cultural roots concerning the end-of-life care in three immigrant societies, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore. Death and dying have become one of core agenda in medical service provision and health policy. Calls have been made for healthcare providers to actively listen and respond with more knowledge and skill to patients in need. In Asia, too, commissioned by Lien Foundation, Quality of Death Index was developed from 2010 to measure the medical, social resources and public education that are related to the quality of life towards the very end of life among citizens of different countries. According to its second version published in 2015, Taiwan was ranked the highest (83.1) among other Chinese speaking regions, ahead of Singapore (77.6) and Hong Kong (66.6) (EIU 2015), revealing the cross-sectional advances and challenges regarding policy and infrastructure but points to the areas yet to be improved in each measured region. In this paper, I argue, the emergence of end-of-life care services in these three countries is related not only to their similar geo-climatic characteristics, culture as immigrant societies but also to their modernity experiences with urbanization and the introduction of modern medicine. From household cares for hospital amenities, such transformation not only illustrates the change of how life has been valued, governed and treated in these societies is but also how much people in these societies accept and feel at ease with the type of dying originally unfamiliar to them.