This panel examines the intersection of women’s care labor with production and state-building in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Focusing on women mobilized for public and collective work, we consider how they negotiated with and were framed by the public division of labor in the early PRC. This gendered division of labor was based on assumptions of the feminine capability for care, including care center workers’ care for children, aunties on the residents’ committees’ care for the community, and sericulturalists’ care for ecology. The existing discourses on women’s labor force participation in the PRC are often based on the distinction between the private and the public, where the private is unrecognized while the public is privileged. We argue that collectivized or professionalized care labor adds nuance to this discourse, because it occupies a public sphere while simultaneously being economically undervalued, a condition premised on its gendered nature. Recent historical and sociological scholarship within the “socialist primitive accumulation” framework highlights how China’s rapid early capital accumulation was significantly supported by the exploitation of women’s informal, unpaid, and/or domestic labor (Jacob Eyferth 2022; Yige Dong 2023). Through a lens focused on gendered care across various professions, the presentations highlight care’s visibility, or, in other words, its recognition by the state in its mobilizing strategy for surplus value accumulation. We collectively argue that labor-intensive and time-consuming public care relied on notions of gendered informal work to justify the increasing occupation of the workers’ time. At the same time, the panel’s conversation sheds light on women’s agency within this labor system, examining their strategies of resistance, challenge, and appropriation against the state’s labor policies and austerity measures. The panel contributes to a deeper understanding of women’s exploited labor and its critical role in the nation’s socio-economic development.