An apocalyptic vision of ageing in China

Abstract

According to the National Bureau of Statistics of China, by 2010 the number of people aged 60 or over had reached 178 million in China or 13% of its population. With the largest elderly population in the world in absolute numbers, China faces a challenge of providing care for the elderly both in the present and the future. Unlike old age pensions and health protection for the elderly, in Chinese society elderly care had never been considered to be a social problem but rather the individual family's responsibility. After the turn of the millennium, as the repercussions of increasingly ageing demographics, the results of the One-Child Policy and drastic changes in traditional family structures gradually became more apparent, this issue of elderly care has increasingly become one of the most pressing concerns for the ageing society. As there is little existing research on this particular topic, this article aims to shed light on elderly care in China, focusing on the care of elderly needing assistance with activities of daily living, since this group of elderly are most in need of care, their numbers having risen to 33 million in 2010. This article argues it is urgent for China to switch from informal family-based elderly care to the state's formal long-term care, illustrates that a model of social insurance (e.g. as in Germany) is advocated by many Chinese scholars and points out the ways in which it is different from both the commercialized models (e.g. as in the USA) and state organized "Beveridge" models (e.g. as in Sweden).

Gender difference in utilization willingness of institutional care among the single seniors: evidence from rural Shandong, China

“…For thousands of years, taking care of the elderly by adult children in family was a basic norm in the Confucian doctrine [1]. In recent years, increased geographic mobility and reduced family size due to one-child policy have made more adult children unavailable for elder care [2].…”

Nursing Care for Elderly People in Germany and China: A Bilateral Comparison and Exploration of Policy Transfer

“…China has already the largest elderly population in the world and by 2050, the number of people aged 65 and older will have increased by 2.5 times from 2010. With this dramatic rise, the number of elderly people in China will exceed the total number of elderly people in all OECD countries [21,22]. Over the same period, the number of all elderly people needing care will also grow 2.5 times.…”

Seeing the People’s Republic of China through the Eyes of Montesquieu: Why Sino-European Collaboration on Eco City Development Suffers from European Misinterpretations of “Good Governance”

“…It is not easy to state whether levels of power concentration are currently higher or lower in China than they were a few centuries ago, but it is beyond any doubt that both the spirit and the laws of the People's Republic of China are not terribly favorable for the introduction of any 'trias politica' or 'sextas politica'. Chinese political and administrative culture, based as it is on a mixture of Confucian, legalist and Communist values can generally be characterized by a desire for order, control and uniformity, respect for hierarchy, appetite for practical rather than theoretical wisdom, importance attached to a mixture of educational achievement and meritocracy on the one hand and personal loyalty and factionalism on the other, and stronger attachment to family than to civic virtues [31][32][33][34][35][36][37]. The above factors are neither particularly conducive to the adoption of checks and balances nor to the sheltering of citizens from autocratic power nor to the safeguarding of any form of separation of powers.…”