As Chinese population ageing becomes increasingly severe, the disjunct between supply and demand for pension services is becoming increasingly serious. The development of elderly care social enterprises plays an important role in solving this disjunction. Such development comes from both the enterprise's own capacity building and from external support. There are abundant studies on the capacity-building of pension social enterprises in the existing literature, but there are relatively few studies on their external support. In order to better study the external support of elderly care social enterprises in China, we adopted the case study method; we selected GY (a typical elderly care social enterprise in China) as a case study according to certain criteria, and we conducted a series of discussions. Firstly, an analytical 'government-society-family' framework was constructed. Second, it was argued that there is insufficient external support for elderly care social enterprises. At the government level, there is a lack of policies, difficulties in implementation and significant geographical differences; at the social level, there are weak support platforms and lack of community supports; and at the family level, there are constraints in regard to traditional concepts and the ability to pay. Finally, an external support system of Chinese elderly care social enterprises was constructed to help more elderly care social enterprises overcome the lack of external support in the development process.
Keywords: elderly care; external support; government-society-family; social enterprise; sustainability.