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China facing rapidly growing aging population
By Dwight Daniels (China Daily)
Updated: 2005-01-07 09:26
Yang Zhi, a 74-year-old retired civil servant in Beijing, took a two-hour bus
ride this week to travel to a special donation centre to give money to a
tsunami-relief fund.
Yang, who with his wife, gets by on a monthly pension of 2,000 yuan (US$240).
They donated a fourth of their monthly income, or 500 yuan (US$60).
"We couldn't find a donation site in our community," Yang told a China Daily
reporter.
The couple, like thousands of other Chinese senior citizens, felt compelled
to assist their Asian sisters and brothers in need, despite the long bus ride
and the monetary sacrifice.
Another story told of a contribution from a 104-year-old woman, giving all
she could afford.
One reads many stories of remarkable kindness occurring at this sad time
throughout China. These accounts touch the heart. China's old care about the
world.
But do we care about them?
Of course we do, but I fear it is not enough. I fear there is another wave of
need that could hit much closer to home, in the very country that is now so
generously helping others.
This wave isn't, thankfully, a tsunami. And it won't be making any big
headlines, because there are no shocking visuals of buildings being flattened or
people being swept away so that television can loop them to show time and time
again.
Yet, it is a staggering crisis in the making, and it involves people of
Yang's age, most of whom are not so lucky as to have government pensions to get
by on.
The State Family Planning and Population Commission, the nation's leading
population think-tank and policy shaper, predicts that from 2000 to 2007, the
number of residents 65 or older will grow throughout the nation from just under
100 million to more than 200 million.
That means a jump in elders of more than 4 million per year, with their
numbers making up as much as 14 per cent of the population by 2007. And the
total is expected to grow by leaps and bounds in the coming decades.
The commission forecasts that the likely proportion of the population 65 or
older will surge to 24 per cent by 2050.
China could suddenly find itself with 400 million elderly mouths to feed by
around 2050, quadrupling the number in the population today. That's more than
all the people currently living in the United States, Mexico and Canada.
Declining fertility rates and prolonged life expectancies are the two main
factors behind the fast-growing ageing population, according to Chinese
sociologists.
The situation is asking for a tenacious social security system, which today,
at best, is patchy.
Things are made worse by the economic changes altering the Chinese landscape.
National talk shows are rife with pundits worrying about the breakdown of
traditional cultural practices in which children traditionally take care of
parents in their old age.
Inter-generational ties are suffering as grown children are forced to move
away by the demands of finding work, and many now say the cost of living in a
more modern world means that they are barely able to take care of their
immediate offspring, much less their parents.
And what about the millions of Chinese elders who are childless? Sociologists
and those who participated in a recent Beijing forum have called for the
establishment of an efficient social security system that can provide a way to
help the nation's elderly.
While the country has more than 40,000 elderly homes for the elderly at the
moment, they provide accommodations to a mere 1 per cent of the ageing
population.
Most of the elderly prefer to stay at home to enjoy their later years. A
complete community care system needs to be established to provide in-time,
open-door services to them. Before the grey wave hits.
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