Life in China’s oldest county highlights challenges of demographic crisis

Xiao said, “Sleep well, eat well, that’s all that matters to old people.” Chanchal, 75, shares a room with a couple in their 80s in what was once a primary school but has now been converted into an old people’s home, in a clear example of China’s demographic crisis.

A poster on the wall of the Rudong Binshan Elderly Apartment warns visitors that the sticky rice dumplings are a choking hazard for elderly relatives. The best thing here, Xiao said, is that “you don’t have to cook for yourself”.

In the late 1960s, Rudong County was so populous that it was selected for China’s one-child policy. Nearly 60 years later, it is the oldest county in the country—about 39 percent of its population is over the age of 60, more than double the national figure of 18.7 percent.

As a result, schools have closed and the county’s cotton and rice fields are struggling to find workers, while the elderly population often lives on meager pensions.

Rudong’s plight offers a preview of China’s demographic challenge, which in its scale and speed promises to eclipse similar crises in other countries such as Japan and Italy. Last month, India overtook China as the world’s most populous country, according to a UN study. This comes after China’s population declined last year for the first time since the 1960s.

For Beijing, the demographic crisis will require painful reforms to a growth model that has transformed China into the world’s second-biggest economy, shifting spending from infrastructure and wealth toward pensions and health care and youth to factories. Including trying to find workers. It will also need to address serious inequalities in the pension system, in which many urban residents receive far higher allowances than most migrant workers and rural residents.

“Population development is an important issue,” President Xi Jinping told top-level cadres this month. He emphasized the party’s new motto of “high-quality development of the population”, which underscores the need for better childcare and education and eases the burden on families.

“What you see in Rudong is only the beginning,” said Huang Wenzheng, a senior fellow at the Center for China and Globalization. “Rudong may one day become a ghost town.”

When the one-child policy was introduced, people hoped that it would help reduce poverty by reducing the number of mouths in Rudong’s densely populated rural households.

“In the 1960s nobody had anything to eat,” said Wu Aiping, an entrepreneur who runs the Huayuantouju Elderly Care Home, another aged care facility in Rudong.

Over time, the one child policy took root and family sizes declined. By the 1980s, as China’s economy grew, young people also began leaving Rudong for more lucrative jobs in Shanghai and other eastern cities.

In 2016, China finally abandoned the one-child policy due to declining fertility rates. But it was already too late for Rudong. In the decade ending 2020, the county’s population declined by about 12 percent to about 880,000. Its disposable income of Rmb43,645 ($6,315) per head in 2022, while high compared to the rest of China, is more than 12 percent behind the rest of the prosperous Jiangsu province.

The elderly are even poorer. Many older people in Rudong say their pension is Rs 300 a month or less. While they say this is not enough, it is still higher than the average monthly rural pension benefit payment of RMB170 in 2021 by the IMF. This is below the absolute rural poverty line of Rmb192 per month set by the central government.

You are viewing a snapshot of an interactive graphic. This is probably due to being offline or JavaScript is disabled in your browser.

Due to China’s rising cost of living, most poor elderly villagers are reluctant to ask their children for money. Due to the one-child policy, some young couples have eight grandparents and four parents to care for in addition to their own children.

As a result, many older people somehow survive. In the shadow of Rudong’s 1,200-year-old Guoqing Temple pagoda, the 77-year-old incense seller said she received a meager pension from the state but worked because she didn’t want to be a “burden” on her son.

A 64-year-old tricycle rider said that he was now too old to take up his former trade of carpentry. He said, ‘No one wants me.

Elderly farmers are still visible in the fields around Rudong. “It’s good to have these old people working,” said the supervisor of a work force of people over 70. They were digging in a field planted with onions and were being paid Rs.8 per hour. “If they stay at home, they get sick quickly,” said the supervisor.

Many employers and local authorities hope to attract young workers in what the government says will be Rudong’s “dynamic decade”, but they are in short supply. As a result, they offer incentives – everything from higher wages to subsidized housing.

A poster in a labor exchange advertising work at one of Rudong’s factories, a plant operated by Irish food, beverage and pharmaceuticals group Kerry, says young male workers are looking for machine operator jobs with monthly wages of Rmb6,500 or more can apply. This is compared to the Rmb5,800 paid to unskilled male workers aged 40-55.

At a new housing development in the city, sales agents said the local government offered discounts to home buyers who had doctoral, master’s degrees or technical qualifications or were families with two children.

These local incentives resonate at the national level.

State media reported that a government agency has launched a pilot project in 20 cities to “encourage childbearing” to create a “new era of marriage culture”. Beijing has also announced initiatives to crack down on dowries and extravagant weddings in a bid to lower wedding costs.

Some cities are introducing cash payments for families having a third child, while others are extending maternity and paternity leave. Many are subsidizing fertility assistance programs such as IVF under national insurance programs.

But analysts question whether the piecemeal initiative will be enough to save China’s economy from demographic decline, which could reduce GDP growth by a percentage point by 2035.

At the current rate, China will have just one worker for every retiree by the end of the century, compared to four workers today, said Bert Hoffman, director of the East Asian Institute at the National University of Singapore.

To compensate for this, the government needs to gradually encourage people to work beyond the current retirement age, which is 50 for women and 60 for men, and according to Hoffman, there are still large rural To encourage the population to take up more productive urban jobs.

You are viewing a snapshot of an interactive graphic. This is probably due to being offline or JavaScript is disabled in your browser.

Policymakers also need to expand private pensions and upgrade the health sector. “You need a comprehensive reform package that brings all these things together,” Hoffman said.

Until such reforms are realized, semi-rural counties such as Rudong will struggle to care for their elderly.

Entrepreneur Wu said his Huayuantouju Elderly Care Home has survived by attracting residents from nearby cities such as Shanghai and Nanjing, who have large pensions.

Showing visitors around the house, whose modest rooms are decorated with portraits of President Xi and first lady Peng Liyuan, Wu said she wants to expand on a neighboring piece of farmland. “There is no shortage of demand,” Wu said.

Nevertheless, his business is also struggling to operate due to lack of staff due to the demographic decline. “Nowadays there is little work for the youth to help the old people take a bath,” he said.

Xiao said, “Sleep well, eat well, that’s all that matters to old people.” Chanchal, 75, shares a room with a couple in their 80s in what was once a primary school but has now been converted into an old people’s home, in a clear example of China’s demographic crisis.

A poster on the wall of the Rudong Binshan Elderly Apartment warns visitors that the sticky rice dumplings are a choking hazard for elderly relatives. The best thing here, Xiao said, is that “you don’t have to cook for yourself”.

In the late 1960s, Rudong County was so populous that it was selected for China’s one-child policy. Nearly 60 years later, it is the oldest county in the country—about 39 percent of its population is over the age of 60, more than double the national figure of 18.7 percent.

As a result, schools have closed and the county’s cotton and rice fields are struggling to find workers, while the elderly population often lives on meager pensions.

Rudong’s plight offers a preview of China’s demographic challenge, which in its scale and speed promises to eclipse similar crises in other countries such as Japan and Italy. Last month, India overtook China as the world’s most populous country, according to a UN study. This comes after China’s population declined last year for the first time since the 1960s.

For Beijing, the demographic crisis will require painful reforms to a growth model that has transformed China into the world’s second-biggest economy, shifting spending from infrastructure and wealth toward pensions and health care and youth to factories. Including trying to find workers. It will also need to address serious inequalities in the pension system, in which many urban residents receive far higher allowances than most migrant workers and rural residents.

“Population development is an important issue,” President Xi Jinping told top-level cadres this month. He emphasized the party’s new motto of “high-quality development of the population”, which underscores the need for better childcare and education and eases the burden on families.

“What you see in Rudong is only the beginning,” said Huang Wenzheng, a senior fellow at the Center for China and Globalization. “Rudong may one day become a ghost town.”

When the one-child policy was introduced, people hoped that it would help reduce poverty by reducing the number of mouths in Rudong’s densely populated rural households.

“In the 1960s nobody had anything to eat,” said Wu Aiping, an entrepreneur who runs the Huayuantouju Elderly Care Home, another aged care facility in Rudong.

Over time, the one child policy took root and family sizes declined. By the 1980s, as China’s economy grew, young people also began leaving Rudong for more lucrative jobs in Shanghai and other eastern cities.

In 2016, China finally abandoned the one-child policy due to declining fertility rates. But it was already too late for Rudong. In the decade ending 2020, the county’s population declined by about 12 percent to about 880,000. Its disposable income of Rmb43,645 ($6,315) per head in 2022, while high compared to the rest of China, is more than 12 percent behind the rest of the prosperous Jiangsu province.

The elderly are even poorer. Many older people in Rudong say their pension is Rs 300 a month or less. While they say this is not enough, it is still higher than the average monthly rural pension benefit payment of RMB170 in 2021 by the IMF. This is below the absolute rural poverty line of Rmb192 per month set by the central government.

You are viewing a snapshot of an interactive graphic. This is probably due to being offline or JavaScript is disabled in your browser.

Due to China’s rising cost of living, most poor elderly villagers are reluctant to ask their children for money. Due to the one-child policy, some young couples have eight grandparents and four parents to care for in addition to their own children.

As a result, many older people somehow survive. In the shadow of Rudong’s 1,200-year-old Guoqing Temple pagoda, the 77-year-old incense seller said she received a meager pension from the state but worked because she didn’t want to be a “burden” on her son.

A 64-year-old tricycle rider said that he was now too old to take up his former trade of carpentry. He said, ‘No one wants me.

Elderly farmers are still visible in the fields around Rudong. “It’s good to have these old people working,” said the supervisor of a work force of people over 70. They were digging in a field planted with onions and were being paid Rs.8 per hour. “If they stay at home, they get sick quickly,” said the supervisor.

Many employers and local authorities hope to attract young workers in what the government says will be Rudong’s “dynamic decade”, but they are in short supply. As a result, they offer incentives – everything from higher wages to subsidized housing.

A poster in a labor exchange advertising work at one of Rudong’s factories, a plant operated by Irish food, beverage and pharmaceuticals group Kerry, says young male workers are looking for machine operator jobs with monthly wages of Rmb6,500 or more can apply. This is compared to the Rmb5,800 paid to unskilled male workers aged 40-55.

At a new housing development in the city, sales agents said the local government offered discounts to home buyers who had doctoral, master’s degrees or technical qualifications or were families with two children.

These local incentives resonate at the national level.

State media reported that a government agency has launched a pilot project in 20 cities to “encourage childbearing” to create a “new era of marriage culture”. Beijing has also announced initiatives to crack down on dowries and extravagant weddings in a bid to lower wedding costs.

Some cities are introducing cash payments for families having a third child, while others are extending maternity and paternity leave. Many are subsidizing fertility assistance programs such as IVF under national insurance programs.

But analysts question whether the piecemeal initiative will be enough to save China’s economy from demographic decline, which could reduce GDP growth by a percentage point by 2035.

At the current rate, China will have just one worker for every retiree by the end of the century, compared to four workers today, said Bert Hoffman, director of the East Asian Institute at the National University of Singapore.

To compensate for this, the government needs to gradually encourage people to work beyond the current retirement age, which is 50 for women and 60 for men, and according to Hoffman, there are still large rural To encourage the population to take up more productive urban jobs.

You are viewing a snapshot of an interactive graphic. This is probably due to being offline or JavaScript is disabled in your browser.

Policymakers also need to expand private pensions and upgrade the health sector. “You need a comprehensive reform package that brings all these things together,” Hoffman said.

Until such reforms are realized, semi-rural counties such as Rudong will struggle to care for their elderly.

Entrepreneur Wu said his Huayuantouju Elderly Care Home has survived by attracting residents from nearby cities such as Shanghai and Nanjing, who have large pensions.

Showing visitors around the house, whose modest rooms are decorated with portraits of President Xi and first lady Peng Liyuan, Wu said she wants to expand on a neighboring piece of farmland. “There is no shortage of demand,” Wu said.

Nevertheless, his business is also struggling to operate due to lack of staff due to the demographic decline. “Nowadays there is little work for the youth to help the old people take a bath,” he said.