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China news tagged with: aging (34)

• Joel Kotkin: America On The Rise

  

  For Forbes, Joel Kotkin writes that both liberal and conservative pundits who assume the rise of China and accompanying demise of America are missing several important points, especially demographics:

  It is a sign of the times that conservatives as well as liberals often underestimate the Middle Kingdom’s problems–in addition to America’s relative strengths.

  Rarely mentioned in such analyses is China’s own aging problem. The population of the People’s Republic will be considerably older than the U.S.’ by 2050. It also has far more boys than girls–a rather insidious problem. Among the younger generation there are already an estimated 24 million more men of marrying age than women. This is not going to end well–except perhaps for investors in prostitution and pornography.

  In the longer term demographic trends actually place the U.S. in a relatively strong position. By the end of the first half of the 21st century, the American population aged 15 to 64–essentially your economically active cohort–are projected to grow by 42%; China’s will shrink by 10%. Comparisons with other competitors are even larger, with the E.U. shrinking by 25%, Korea by 30% and Japan by a remarkable 44%.

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  • February 10, 2010 9:23 PM

• Graying Shanghai Encourages Couples To Have 2 Kids

  

  From AP:

  Family planning officials in Shanghai are making home visits and slipping leaflets under doorways to encourage certain residents to have a second child in a bid to balance the city’s expanding senior population.

  A statement about the new campaign posted Thursday on the Web site of the Shanghai Population and Family Planning Commission was quick to emphasize that it didn’t signal any change in China’s one-child rule and was only an attempt to let people know about the policy’s many exceptions.

  About 3 million, or 21 percent, of Shanghai’s nearly 13.7 million registered residents are now aged 60 or older, the statement said.

  Xie Lingli, the commission’s director, was quoted as saying authorities will go door to door to try to encourage couples to have a second child if both grew up as only children.

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  • July 23, 2009 7:38 PM

• China’s Elderly Will Overwhelm The Nation

  

  From Los Angeles Times:

  For three decades China’s one-child policy helped power this nation’s economic rise. With fewer mouths to feed, families saved. Poverty fell. Living standards improved.

  But a social experiment that worked well in some respects is now threatening the country’s hard-won gains. China’s working-age population — the engine behind its prolific growth — will start shrinking within a few years.

  Meanwhile, the ranks of elderly are projected to soar. By the middle of this century, fully a third of China’s population will be age 60 or older, compared with 26% in the United States. China’s projected 438 million senior citizens will outnumber the entire U.S. population.

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  • July 6, 2009 12:45 AM

• China Addresses Care for Increasingly Aging Population

  

  Like many countries, China faces the demographic issue of an increasing aging population that is living longer.  11% of the Chinese population (153 million people) are age 60 or over, and this demographic is expected to increase to 248 million by 2020.

  

  To promote services for pensioners, earlier this year the country set the goal of promoting care services for the elderly in all urban communities by 2010. In rural areas, 80 percent of townships will have at least one welfare center for retired persons… [Currently,] Special welfare care centers are still in short supply around the country. The number of beds they offer could accommodate only about 1.16 percent of current elderly population.

  To help accommodate this growing population, local governments have built seniors’ housing, such as this one in Zhejiang Province.

  China has been celebrating “Seniors Day” since 1989.  China has also created a monthly “Centarian Allowance” for seniors over 100 years old.

  Read also CDT’s past posts, such as China Expects Communities to Take More Care of Elderly People

  (Image courtesy of www.photoeverywhere.co.uk)

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  • October 13, 2008 6:58 PM

• Aging Chinese Population Spells A Future Housing Bust

  

  Predicting the post-Olympics housing market for the immediate future would be difficult. But in the long-term, when China faces an aging population, the housing boom now may seem like a golden time. Translated by CDT from Oriental Morning Post via Sina:

  “Population bonus,” the abundant supply of working-age population in a country, is contributing 27% to China’s per capital GDP growth, said Cai Fang, director of the population and labor economics institute with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. But with an aging population in China, the population bonus will be exhausted by 2013.

  Chinese policy makers are increasingly aware that China not only needs to worry about the overgrowth of population, but also about a changing demographic, especially when China’s baby boomers enter retirement age. Now, these people born in the 1960s and 1970s were or have been at the stage in their lives of getting married and buying homes late last century and early this one. But since 1990, China’s birth rate has been decreasing. According to the 2000 census, there were 69 million of those aged 0-4 years old, half the number for the range aged 10-14.

  Many worry that while the baby boomers have pushed up the housing market over the last decade, China will soon be dealing with dwindling demand from the new generation coming of age but with a dramatically small population scale. And this will mean a slipping real estate market and dipping house prices.

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  • August 30, 2008 2:03 PM

• Video: ‘Hip-Hop Grannies’ Take the Stage

  

  Grandmothers are joining cheerleaders on the stage and on the airwaves, reports Voice of America, and they call themselves “The Hip-Hop Grannies.”

  Wu Yi retired at the mandatory age of 55. Bored at home, she saw hip-hop dancing on TV and thought it would be fun to try.

  She is 70 and says she is active. “Those in their 70s just eat a little and watch TV, sit in front of it, say, ‘What is this?’ They are withering, and walk like this. But you can see I am different. I dance everyday. Life is about exercise. It makes me not only healthy, but gives me a flexible body and I do not suffer from sickness,” she said.

  See also a VOA Video: Retired Women Lead New Dance Craze in China

  Chinese audiences have responded with enthusiasm and, according to Independent Television News, the world may be next, as the “grannies” bring their energy to the Olympic stage this summer:

  More about The Hip-Hop Grannies, from Reuters.

  More about aging and retirement in China, from CDT.

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  • February 16, 2008 11:10 AM

• Nation Faces Challenges Of Graying Population – Wu Jiao

  

  From China Daily:

  The country faces unprecedented challenges in economic and social spheres as a result of a fast expanding aging population, top officials warned Monday.

  With two working people for every retiree between 2030 and 2050, the country is expected to see the end of a decades-long advantage it enjoyed with a low-cost labor market.

  Currently, the ratio is 6:1, according to figures from the China National Committee on Aging (CNCA).

  “We might encounter the heaviest burden especially after 2030, when the demographic dividend is set to end,” said Yan Qingchun, deputy director of the office of the CNCA. [Full Text]

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  • December 18, 2007 3:05 AM

• Photo Series: Romance in an Old Beijing Hutong

  

  For Chinese senior citizens, romance is what you do every day simply for the person you love. Below is a group of pictures of an old couple in Beijing taken by a fengniao photographer.

  “On a summer day, I wandered into Houxiwachang Hutong (ÂêéÁªÜÁì¶ÂéÇËÉ°Âêå) in Beijing and encountered an old man who was carrying some heavy planks out of his courtyard house.”

  

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  • November 19, 2007 2:34 PM

• In Ten Years, Who Will Farm the Land? – He Bing

  

  Danwei translates an article from the Beijing News, which looks at the demographics of agricultural work in China, when most of the young people have gone to the cities to find work:

  I met a number of village cadres, all of whom were in the grandpa/grandma range, most of them over fifty and some even on the other side of sixty. They said that the young people had all left, and the ones who hadn’t left were unwilling to be village officials. “It’s only 1000 yuan a year. Where’s the motivation in that?” And according to them, the village schools were empty: “The good teachers have all gone, and they students left with them.”

  Going through the data after I returned, I discovered that aging among the the population of working farmers is a nationwide phenomenon. In the better situations, the average age is above forty; in the worse, it’s above fifty”there are only white-haired people living beside the mountains and streams. In the villages of the past, though they were poor there was always the sound of chickens and dogs, of people laughing and horses snorting: a “lively countryside.” But today, such situations are rare, such sights have long since disappeared. [Full text]

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  • November 12, 2007 9:04 PM

• China’s Elderly Care Conundrum – James Reynolds

  

  The BBC looks at the effects of the one-child policy on the condition of the elderly in China today:

  Right now Jie Jie has absolutely no idea how much his family is counting on him.

  When he gets older, he will have to support them all. Six adults – and just one child. This is the effect of China’s one-child policy. [Full text]

  [Image: Jie Jie Cai and his extended family, via BBC]

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  • August 23, 2007 2:55 PM

• China Scrambles for Stability as Its Workers Age – Howard W. French

  

  From the New York Times:

  The proportion of people 60 and older is growing faster in China than in any other major country, with the number of retirees set to double between 2005 and 2015, when it is expected to reach 200 million. By midcentury, according to United Nations projections, roughly 430 million people ” about a third of the population ” will be retirees.

  That increase will place enormous demands on the country’s finances and could threaten the underpinnings of the Chinese economy, which has thrived for decades on the cheap labor of hundreds of millions of young, uneducated workers from the countryside. Changes in the country’s population structure are taking place hand in hand with changes in the structure of the Chinese family. China’s one-child policy, which began in 1980, means that, beginning with the current generation of young adults, couples will face the difficult task of caring for four parents through old age. [Full text]

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  • March 22, 2007 8:41 AM

• Pensions Just a Dream for China’s Aging Villagers – Lindsay Beck

  

  From Reuters:

  Xie Huilan, 66, has worked all of her adult life and has never given a thought to retirement.

  Indeed, she and her 73-year-old husband work harder than ever, farming their plot of land in China’s northwestern province of Shaanxi and caring for their grandchildren, whose parents are migrant workers in the cities.

  “Of course I’m tired, but there is nothing I can do,” said Xie, sitting inside her small courtyard home in this poor, drought-prone region of Shaanxi.

  China is already home to more than half the old people in Asia and by 2050 its elderly are expected to exceed 400 million. Long before that point, analysts say, the burden of the elderly will far outweigh the benefits of having fewer children under China’s strict family planning rules.[Full Text]

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  • March 2, 2007 9:46 AM

• China in Alzheimer’s double bind – BBC News

  

  From BBC News (photo: Dr. Xiao treating Alzheimer’s patients, via bbc.co.uk):

  The country now has a third of all Alzheimer’s patients in the world. And the number of diagnosed cases is rising.

  China’s economic success means people are living longer, says Professor Xiao Shifu, a director at Shanghai’s leading mental health hospital.

  “Alzheimer’s prevalence has been about what you’d expect in the west. But now it’s increasing very fast because China is ageing at a very rapid rate,” he said.

  And the enormous changes in society are taking their toll, especially on the old. [Full Text]

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  • February 12, 2007 5:10 PM

• Shanghai Still Doesn’t Have Enough People – Peijin Chen

  

  From Shanghaiist:

  Shanghai’s rapidly aging population means that there’s a labor force shortage, especially in the 25-35-year-old age group (report in Chinese).

  Therefore, Shanghai has to “import” 244,000 workers over the next five years to make up for this. We wonder if they include, in these figures, all the migrants that come anyway.

  The report says that families will be allowed to have two kids, subject to certain restrictions. We heard before that two only children in Shanghai, e.g. those born in the late 1970s after the enactment of the one-child policy, could have two children, but we never checked to see if that was a law or just hearsay….[Full Text]

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  • February 4, 2007 1:51 PM

• China Says Skewed Sex-ratio Could Mean Instability – Reuters

  

  From Reuters:
  
  

  China will be home to 300 million more men than women by 2020, state media said on Thursday, warning the gender imbalance, along with an aging population and rapid urbanization, could be destabilizing.

  China has about 119 boys born for every 100 girls, an imbalance that has grown since it introduced a one-child policy more than 25 years ago to curb population growth — a restriction that bolstered a traditional preference for boys…

  Already the combination of an aging population and single-child families mean that only-children face the prospect of looking after two parents and four grandparents, a potentially huge financial burden in the absence of a comprehensive pension system. [Full Text]

  Read CDT’s post on the related issue of Aging.

  (Photo of China’s propaganda poster on One Child Policy)

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  • January 11, 2007 7:52 PM

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