According to the international standard for defining an aging society, the mainland has already entered into an aging society in 2020, and the pressure on pensions has increased dramatically, with 22 provinces and cities already failing to meet their pension obligations.
The international standard for an aging society is that 10% of the population is over 60 and 7% of the population is over 65. According to Tencent Finance, China has been an aging society since 2000, and in 2018, the mainland’s population of people aged 60 and over was 249 million, accounting for 17.9% of the total population, and in 2019, there will be 253.88 million people aged 60 and over, accounting for 18.1% of the total population.
If the proportion of the population over 65 years old exceeds 14%, it indicates a deeply aging society.
In 2019, China’s population over 65 years old will account for more than 12.6% of the total population, with some provinces already having more than 14%, taking the lead in entering a “moderately aging” society. According to the news, excluding Tibet, 30 provinces, cities and autonomous regions in China have already entered the aging stage, and 13 of them are above the mainland average (12.57%). Shanghai, Liaoning, Shandong, Sichuan, Chongqing, Jiangsu, Zhejiang and other seven provinces have entered the stage of deep aging, of which Shanghai has reached 16.26% of the population over 65 years of age, almost three times that of Tibet (6.02%), ranking first.
The aging of the society has increased the pressure on the elderly. From the old-age dependency ratio data, it can be seen that in 2019, the mainland old-age dependency ratio is 17.8%, an increase of 1 percentage point from the previous year’s 16.8%. It shows that there are about 17.8 seniors to support for every 100 people of working age, which means that it takes about six people of working age to support one senior citizen. The elderly dependency ratio is growing at a significantly higher rate than the child dependency ratio, indicating that the current aging process is significantly faster than the birth of newborns.
By region, in 2018, nearly 40% of the 31 provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities had elderly dependency ratios that exceeded the mainland level (17.8%). In Shandong, Shanghai, Chongqing, Sichuan, Liaoning and Anhui, the dependency ratio of the elderly population reached more than 20% in six regions. Among them, Shandong has only four working-age people to share the burden of one elderly person, which is the greatest pressure.
The mainland now relies heavily on pensions for retirement, but according to the China Insurance Association’s “Third Pillar of Pensions Research Report” released on November 20, it is predicted that China will have a pension gap of up to 8 trillion to 10 trillion yuan in five to 10 years, and the gap will widen further over time.
In order to keep the pension pool from drying up, the CCP has had to inject money into the pension funds. Among them, 22 regions such as Liaoning, Heilongjiang, Hubei, Jilin, Inner Mongolia, and Sichuan (including the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps) have become “net beneficiaries”. The three northeastern provinces and Hubei are the biggest beneficiaries.
Faced with an aging society and a declining birth rate, the mainland opened up the possibility of having two children in 2016, but so far with little success.
In the first year (2016) after the implementation of the comprehensive two-child policy, the number of births reached 17.86 million, a record high in this century, according to mainland-wide data. By 2018, the two-child effect had waned significantly, with only 15.23 million people born that year.In 2019, 14.65 million people will be born, 580,000 fewer than in 2018. In terms of the birth rate, it was 10.48 per thousand in 2019, a record low.
As for the reasons why women of school age are reluctant to have children, mainland CFI said that heavy economic burden became the main reason for reluctance to have children, accounting for 60.3%.
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