This content was first published by Radio Free Asia, and it is now being reprinted with permission.
The decision Chinese Communist Party has announced plans to raise the retirement age as part of its answer to , falling births , and a , rapidly aging population.
At a recent top-level meeting in Beijing, party leader Xi Jinping demanded that the government and the government “advance transformation to gradually increase the statutory retirement age in accordance with the principle of encouraging deliberate participation while allowing appropriate versatility.”
Xi even urged action to “improve the systems for supporting population growth and providing relevant services, refine the policy system and incentive mechanisms for boosting the birth rate, and enhance the policies and mechanisms for developing elder care programs and industries.”
China’s statutory retirement age is one of the lowest in the world, now set at 60 for men, 55 for sexual officials, and 50 for female employees.
Retired professor Gu Guoping, who now lives in Shanghai, said the government are likely to transform the mandatory retirement age to 65 for men and 55 for girls, which is likely to be unhappy.
” The vast majority of people in China do n’t want a later retirement age”, he said. ” Some people want to retire at 58 or 55″.
” If you start to receive]your pension ] too late, you’ll only have a short time left to enjoy it”, Gu said.
He added:” People live longer on average than men, but having them leave at 50 is very shortly”, Gu said. According to the majority of people, raising their retirement years to 55 is reasonable and acceptable.
Given that men do n’t live as long as women, it makes no sense to prevent them from retiring at 60.
Rising living duration
In the meantime, the government are getting folks used to the concept of a after pensions by promoting “flexibility” and deliberate techniques, he said.
International health journal , The Lancet , reported last year that average life expectancy in China will probably fall to 81.3 years older by 2035, 85.1 times for girls and 78 years for men, with the space widening from 5.2 years in 2019 to 7 years by that time.
However, the drawback of early retirement is that, in Gu’s opinion, older people continue to work at a time of common youth unemployment.
A Beijing citizen who requested anonymity for fear of reprisals claimed that part of the problem is that those who are already employed are paying for the retirement of those who are already retired, making the social security system becoming increasingly top-heavy and untenable as the people age and births drop.
Raising the annuity era to 65 may fall a lot of people into financial hardship, she said.
She argued that “delaying retirement should be a system-wide approach,” arguing that more jobs for older people would be required if they could n’t collect their pensions until that point.
” Not many individuals in today’s China stay with the same company their whole living”, the lady said. People will be forced to perform strange work, change businesses, and work until the pensionable retirement age is delayed.
” Measures need to be in place to support this kind of situation, especially when it comes to]preventing rampant ] age discrimination”, she said. ” Those attitudes are entrenched and are n’t going to change overnight”.
Meager income sources
The National Pension Fund will have no money left in the city’s pension system by 2035, according to a recent analysis from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and the International Monetary Fund has predicted that a slow market will also have an effect on the income program.
In China, about 300 million people are expected to retire in the next ten years, which is putting a lot of pressure on pension funding.
While 10 working-age people supported 1 retiree in 2002, the ratio had fallen to 5 to 1 by 2021. It will likely fall further to 4 in 2030 and 2 in 2050, Larry Hu, chief economist at Macquarie, told Reuters in January.
China’s pension system consists of three elements: basic pension, corporate and occupational annuities, and personal pension plans.  ,
People are less likely to be able to afford the optional components of that package because of the economic downturn.
Only 20 % of the 50 million people who received personal pensions at the end of 2023 had contributed anything, with the average personal pension pot value of US$ 275,000.
China’s population aged 60 and over reached 296.97 million in 2023, about 21.1 % of its total population, up from 280.04 million in 2022, Reuters reported on Jan. 18.
China created a special fund in 2018 to shift pension funds from richer coastal provinces like Guangdong to places like Heilongjiang and Liaoning, to tackle cross-country disparities, yet about a third of China’s provincial-level jurisdictions are running pension deficits, the agency reported.
