China Ages
- From: ppp@xxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 30 Jun 2006 15:26:44 GMT
As China ages, a shortage of cheap labor looms
(The New York Times)
Updated: 2006-06-30 15:14
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/30/world/asia/30aging.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5094&en=92530c7ed24b728e&hp&ex=1151726400&partner=homepage
Shanghai is rightfully known as a fast-moving, hypermodern city - full
of youth and vigor. But that obscures a less well-known fact: Shanghai
has the oldest population in China, and it is getting older in a
hurry.
The courtyard of the Minsheng Nursing Home. Residents pay the
equivalent of US$100 a month to live there.
Residents playing mah-jongg in the Minsheng Nursing Home in northern
Shanghai. Founded in 1998, it has 350 beds, which are now 95 percent
occupied. The city is in the forefront of a nationwide aging trend.
[The New York Times]
Twenty percent of this city's people are at least 60, the common
retirement age for men in China, and retirees are easily the fastest
growing segment of the population, with 100,000 new seniors added to
the rolls each year, according to a study by the Shanghai Academy of
Social Sciences. From 2010 to 2020, the number of people 60 or older
is projected to grow by 170,000 a year.
By 2020 about a third of Shanghai's population, currently 13.6
million, will consist of people over the age of 59, remaking the
city's social fabric and placing huge new strains on its economy and
finances.
The changes go far beyond Shanghai, however. Experts say the rapidly
graying city is leading one of the greatest demographic changes in
history, one with profound implications for the entire country.
The world's most populous nation, which has built its economic
strength on seemingly endless supplies of cheap labor, China may soon
face manpower shortages. An aging population also poses difficult
political issues for the government, which first encouraged a
population explosion in the 1950's and then reversed course and
introduced the so-called one-child policy a few years after the death
of Mao in 1976.
That measure has spared the country an estimated 390 million births
but may ultimately prove to be another monumental demographic mistake.
With China's breathtaking rise toward affluence, most people live
longer and have fewer children, mirroring trends seen around the
world.
Those trends and the extraordinarily low birth rate have combined to
create a stark imbalance between young and old. That threatens the
nation's rickety pension system, which already runs large deficits
even with the 4-to-1 ratio of workers to retirees that it was designed
for.
Demographers also expect strains on the household registration system,
which restricts internal migration. The system prevents young workers
from migrating to urban areas to relieve labor shortages, but
officials fear that abolishing it could release a flood of humanity
that would swamp the cities.
As workers become scarcer and more expensive in the increasingly
affluent cities along China's eastern seaboard, the country will face
growing economic pressures to move out of assembly work and other
labor-intensive manufacturing, which will be taken up by poorer
economies in Asia and beyond, and into service and information-based
industries.
"For the last two decades China has enjoyed the advantage of having a
high ratio of working-age people in the population, but that situation
is about to change," said Zuo Xuejin, vice president of the Shanghai
Academy of Social Sciences. "With the working-age population
decreasing, our labor costs will become less competitive, and
industries in places like Vietnam and Bangladesh will start becoming
more attractive."
India, the world's other emerging giant, also stands to benefit, with
low wages and a far younger population than China.
Even within China, Mr. Zuo said, many foreign investors have begun
moving factories away from Shanghai and other eastern cities to inland
locations, where the work force is cheaper and younger.
As remote as many of these problems may seem today in Shanghai, the
country's most prosperous city, evidence of the changes is already on
abundant display. If Shanghai represents the future of China, it is in
central Shanghai's Jingan district, where roughly 4,000 people, or 30
percent of the residents, are above 60, that one can glimpse that
future.
Squads of lightly trained social workers monitor the city's older
residents, paying regular house visits aimed at combating isolation
and assuring that medical problems are attended to.
At 10 a.m. on a recent spring morning, Chen Meijuan walked up a narrow
wooden stairway to the secondfloor apartment where Liang Yunyu has
lived for the last 58 years.
"Good morning, Granny," Ms. Chen called out as she entered the
100-year-old woman's small bedroom. "Did you have a good night's
sleep?"
Ms. Chen, 49, earns about US$95 a month as one of 15 agents who
monitor the neighborhood's elderly population. Her caseload exceeds
200.
"I usually pay visits to about five or six households a day, stay a
little while and chat with them," she said. "For Grandma Liang I am a
little more focused, visiting two or three times a week."
After being introduced to a foreign visitor, Ms. Liang regaled her
guests with stories, ranging across the decades of the 20th century.
She recounted the arrival of Japanese invaders in the city nearly 70
years ago, her opening of a kindergarten in 1958.
Liang Yunyu, who is 100, in her second-floor apartment. Her social
worker also visits more than 200 others.
"My daughter always invites me to live with her family, but I feel
embarrassed to be with them," said, pausing from her tales. "I'm
worried I might die in her home, so I prefer staying where I am."
Her son, Zha Yuheng, 76, a grandfather and retired textile industry
worker, lives with her now, which also concerns her. "I am taken good
care of here," she said, "but living with my son leaves him with a big
burden, I'm afraid."
Mr. Zha protested that his mother was little trouble at all. "Every
morning I get water for her and make sure it is not too hot or too
cold, and she handles everything else on her own," he said. "She gets
up, dresses, makes the beds and even makes food for herself."
In many wealthy societies the very old are candidates for nursing home
care. That sector is still tiny in China, though, especially compared
with the size of elderly population. Zhang Minsheng opened the city's
first private nursing home in 1998 in an industrial area far from
central Shanghai. It is now 95 percent occupied.
"People were not willing to enter nursing homes in the past, because
they were considered places for those without descendants," Mr. Zhang
said. "Now, from the standpoint of ordinary people, it is becoming a
normal thing."
The average age of the residents of Mr. Zhang's home is 85, and most
live several to a room, sleeping on narrow beds separated by flimsy
partitions. Many pass the daytime hours in long corridors furnished
with chairs, where they chat or simply stare into the distance.
The sheer magnitude of the aging phenomenon has Chinese officials and
academics grasping for answers, but almost everyone agrees that there
are no easy fixes. Population experts here speak of "patching one hole
and exploding another."
China has a wide range of retirement ages, generally from 50 to 60.
Raising the retirement age would relieve pressures on the pension
system but make it harder for young people to find jobs. And it would
be resented by many elderly people, most of whom have missed out on
China's economic boom.
Lifting restrictions on internal migration raises the unwelcome
prospect of a mass migration, while abandoning the one-child policy
would be politically unpalatable.
The government has already tinkered with the policy. It now allows
husbands and wives who were their parents' only children to have a
second child, for example, and has eliminated a four-year waiting
period between births for those eligible to have a second child.
But Chinese demographic experts say the leadership is unlikely to
abolish the one-child rule, because it is reluctant to admit that one
of its signature policies was in any way a failure - particularly in
view of the disastrous population boom encouraged by Mao in the
1950's.
Moreover, lifting child-bearing restrictions might not help. Poorer
people in the interior might have more children, but the rising middle
class probably will not, experts say.
"More births would only change the structure of the population and
prolong the aging process" of the society as a whole, said Ren Yuan, a
professor at the Population Research Center of Fudan University in
Shanghai. "But it has nothing to do with the number of old people. The
scale of this large group has already become a reality. The beds
you've got to add in nursing homes, the labor you need to take care of
the old, is a reality than can't be changed."
.
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