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Examining the “world's largest cash-based social policy” through the lens of care reveals widely shared scalar imaginaries and the productivity of care in constituting scale. In standardizing the minimum livelihood guarantee (dibao), officials, applicants and researchers in rural Sichuan cited both “too much” and “not enough” care at the scale of the family in recommending or rejecting state assistance. Different levels of organization (scale1) were not stable bases with specific sizes and qualities (scale2) that enabled or limited care. Dibao-related practices were evaluated as an appropriate (“filial piety”), insufficient (“individualism”) or excessive (“corruption”) amount of family care. Care became an indicator of kinship measurements and a marker of state boundaries. Thus, scale (in both meanings) was enacted in China, as elsewhere, through negotiations of needs and responsibilities, through evaluations of care practices and their outcomes. In this sense, care scales.

Widespread procedures to measure what is taken to be kinship condition negotiations of various forms of belonging (family, ethnicity, nation, race, and even humanity). Kinship measurements require indicators, evidence, and persuasive display to become institutionalized. This introduction shows these measurements’ generative force, which enables their translation into differentiated access to resources. Kinship measurements pull together different and sometimes contrasting ideas, practices, and materialities. Different measurements can add up, mutually reinforcing each other, and reach thresholds for inclusion or exclusion. Yet most often they remain contested, produce gradual results, and do not achieve closure. Grouping them together as assessments of closeness or similarity, we explore the productivity of kinship measurements in diverse settings, such as medicine, bureaucracy, and ritual, to demonstrate how they shape inequalities and marginalizations.