Aging Asians Test China's Social Security
Imagine the entire population of the United States.  Now imagine all of those people over the age of 60.  Now imagine them all being Chinese.  This will be the reality in China by 2025.  China's rapidly growing senior population is beginning to reek havoc on China's social security reserves reports newspapers worldwide on Tuesday.  Finally, lawmakers in China have begun to pay serious attention to the elderly, growing at a whopping 3% every year.  Beijing announced Tuesday that the allotment of pensions, health care and numerous other programs has become a "national priority."  Currently, the elderly population represents 14% of China's total population of 1.3 billion.  This doesn't sound like so much.  The American population over 60 years of age is about the same.  However, taking into account the 3% growth rate coupled with the stunted birth rate caused by the one-child policy, the number of wrinkled Chinese is expected to soar.  According to Xinhua, China's elderly will top 200 million by 2015 and by 2050, the elderly will represent 30% of nation's population and a fifth of the world's total senior population.  Not only will this massive number of seniors create a need for more government welfare services, but it will skew the ratio of working people to retired people posing a major threat to China's economy.  Taking into account non-working children and students, by the half-century mark, there will be 1 worker per retiree.  In 1990, there were 10 workers per retiree.  In Tuesday's report, government officials said that 60% of China's golden-agers live in the countryside where many of them are left without any pension guarantees.  Whereas in the past, the children of these rural seniors would have cared for them in their old age, nowadays the offspring have flocked to the cities to work.  More old people means more people who enjoy staring at me on the street.  But more important, it means the Chinese government will have to address a demographic shift that has the potential to take China off its path to economic dominance.
 
•AP: Welfare for Old Will Be Challenge

 

 

 

 

 

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