China is accelerating into an aging society, and recent official figures from the Communist Party of China show that the country’s elderly population will exceed 300 million in the next five years, with the working population plummeting by 35 million.
According to comprehensive media reports, the State Council Information Office of the Communist Party of China held a press conference on the morning of 26th, and in response to a question about aging and delaying the retirement age, Youjun said that by the end of 2019, the proportion of people aged 60 and above had reached 18.1%, and it is expected that during the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-2025), China The elderly population is expected to exceed 300 million during the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-2025), moving from light to moderate aging.
In addition to the aging population, Youjun pointed out that China’s working-age population has been declining year by year, starting in 2012, with an average annual decrease of more than 3 million, and the decrease is expected to increase gradually, with a further decrease of 35 million during the 14th Five-Year Plan.
On the same day, Youjun also mentioned again the “delayed retirement age”, saying that “the current retirement age in China is generally low, and does not match the per capita Life expectancy.”
China is one of the countries with the fastest aging population, with the proportion of people aged 60 and above at the end of 2019 at about 18 percent, and the China Development Report 2020: Trends and Policies for China’s Aging Population predicts that by 2050, China will have close to 500 million elderly people.
In addition to an increasing elderly population, China’s record low birth rate is one of the main reasons for the demographic imbalance. China has been encouraging fertility in recent years, and the communiqué of the fifth meeting of the 18th Communist Party Congress in 2015 stated that the policy of two children per couple will be fully implemented. But the change in policy does not seem to have given much impetus to China to increase its birth rate.
According to data from the Ministry of Public Security, 10.035 million newborns were born in 2020 and registered with public security organs, a drop of about 15 percent compared to 2019, when China had 11.87 million births even during the Great Famine of 1961, according to public sources.
Some analysts believe that the high cost of housing, Education and healthcare in China in recent years, combined with social issues such as employment discrimination, have become a stumbling block for many Chinese people having children.
According to reports, the Chinese Communist Party‘s harsh one-child policy, which began in the late 1970s with forced abortions, forced sterilizations, and fines for over-births across the country, has wreaked havoc on hundreds of millions of Chinese people, especially women, and caused the deaths of at least 400 million babies, while leading to a decline in China’s fertility rate and a severely aging population.
According to Feinian Chen, a sociologist at the University of Maryland who studies population development, if the fertility rate continues to decline in the future, the pressure of an aging population will follow, which will not only affect the economy but also create social problems such as caring for the elderly population. Even if the government intends to save the fertility rate, it will not help for now.
Recent Comments