Elderly people in China’s Jiangsu province visit a temple in Rugao. (March 31, 2021)
China’s latest census results have raised questions and controversy in all sectors of society, but some seniors interviewed by Voice of America said their main concern is not the growing aging problem reflected in the census results, but their experiences and concerns about their retirement in their twilight years.
Living “the rest of your life”
Data from China’s seventh census shows that of the country’s 1.4 billion-plus population, 260.02 million people, or 18.70 percent, are 60 years old or older, with 190.64 million people, or 13.50 percent, aged 65 or older. Ning Jizhe, director of China’s National Bureau of Statistics, said on May 11: “Aging has become the basic national condition of China in the coming period.”
Ms. Su, a 71-year-old retired teacher in Beijing, told Voice of America, “The population is nearly 1.42 billion people, but the aging is so strong that there is no more of this large group of us, and the people in the future can’t pick up the slack, and there is no one to work. The old ones don’t die, but they can’t work anymore, and the young people underneath don’t give birth (children), you say, how to do ah?”
This group of elderly people, called “the same age of the motherland”, aged about 70, went to the mountains and the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, and settled in the squad, their youthful years were cut short, and in the early 1980s, they caught up with the government to push the one-child policy, political turmoil and population policy, which profoundly affected their lives.
Elderly people playing mahjong in a park in Beijing. (April 6, 2021)
Ms. Su says she has no desire to “dwell” on the government’s family planning policy and what happened to her generation, nor is she concerned about how the government will carry out its brainwashing: “Let’s not worry about the government, let’s just live the rest of our lives well, what about the country in the future? Let’s do whatever we like.”
The New York Times Chinese website reports that China’s family planning policy is “one of the most intrusive government policies in the world” and has been a major source of public discontent in China for decades.
Trying to squeeze into a good nursing home
Ms. Wang, a retired doctor from Tianjin, has met many elderly retirees. She told the Voice of America that the results of the “People’s Daily Survey” show that the biggest social problem is retirement, that the inside story of life in a nursing home haunts many older people, and that what the “People’s Daily Survey” calls China’s aging society is not what it is advertised to be. The “sunset” is not as rosy as advertised.
She said: “To live in a good nursing home, you have to have the financial strength. If you want to live in relative comfort and economy, you don’t want to be able to reach it financially. In order to survive in nursing homes and get a little more care and priority, the elderly are often also given gifts and connections to hit on the hired help and leaders there, however, not every elderly person has the resources.”
Ms. Wang, a retired doctor, added that the income and treatment of the elderly in their old-age pensions centrally reflects the hierarchical differences in Chinese society, which are especially prominent in major cities such as Beijing and Shanghai. According to her, superior senior living and medical facilities are tied to the social status, income and family background of the elderly. There are usually long lines at ordinary nursing homes. In good hospitals, the senior wards (buildings) lie for adults with many people with money or special treatment, while the outpatient offices are often so crowded that even the aisles of the corridors have to be filled with extra beds.
Elderly people eating lunch in a nursing home in Rugao, Jiangsu Province. (March 31, 2021)
Entering a nursing home siege and trying to get out
Dr. Wang said, “Services within nursing homes are also uneven, with too many reports of elder abuse and poor service, and then there are the poor medical skills of the designated hospitals contacted by some nursing homes.”
Dr. Wang said another big worry is that interpersonal relationships in nursing homes are not as simple as outside society: “You think it’s good to live in a nursing home, but once you live there, there are still problems, because there is also a society, all kinds of old people together, gang up on each other, there are also small groups, so the mood is not necessarily happy after living in a nursing home. Things gather in groups, people are divided into groups, do not think of nursing homes as so simple.”
Dr. Wang said that after a period of time, some elderly people, including many elderly senior intellectuals she knows, want to leave the nursing home. Don’t look at the nursing home, in fact, the old people are very lonely, there can not relieve the loneliness of the elderly inside. During the day, there are some lively activities in the home, but once the activities are over and they return to their beds, or after the lights go out at night, these old people will suddenly feel like “losing their souls”.
Dr. Wang said: “The previous generation of elderly people, financially and materially, on the surface, not so rich as now, but, affection and family warmth a little more, of course, here refers to the filial heart of strong children. Nowadays, children are not the same. From the parents’ point of view, how good it is for children to coordinate with each other to take care of the elderly, however, in the future, there will be only one child left in the family, or two children facing four elderly people, how can we do this matter of old age? It’s so sad.”
Experts to see the sunset from a different perspective
Professor Chen, a retired professor from a university in Beijing, has another view on the aging and one-child policy reflected in China’s “People’s Plan,” saying that China’s centralized control does have a considerable impact on the demographic imbalance, especially on the formation of the aging problem, but aging is not the inevitable result of the one-child policy. The causes are not the same.
The level of modern medicine in China has made people’s lives better and life expectancy per capita has become longer as a result, making an aging society inevitable,” he said. In addition, the choice of many young Chinese people during the period of China’s international integration is that they won’t have children and don’t even get married. I know that many young people in big cities like Beijing and Shanghai don’t get married, and opening up the second child is said to be less attractive because the cost of living is too high.”
On the other hand, Su Yue, chief analyst of the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) China, was quoted by several media as saying that the opening up of the two-child policy has not changed the trend of China’s rapidly declining fertility rate and that the aging process of China’s population is accelerating. The BBC quoted Yi Fuxian, a professor at the University of Wisconsin and author of “The Great Nation’s Empty Nest: China’s Family Planning Gone Astray,” as saying that with economic development, China’s fertility rate will decline like that of Europe or Singapore, and coupled with the long-standing family planning policy, the rate of China’s population decline will be ‘precipitous,’ and China The aging crisis in China’s society will be even more serious.
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