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China's Aging Population

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Current situation.
China's population is aging. In 1999, China's elderly population (ages 60 and older) reached 10 percent, formally marking China as an aging society by international standards (Zhan, 2013). According to the National Bureau of Statistics of the People's Republic of China (2012), the population for people who over 60 and 65 were about 190 million (13.7%) and 122 million (9.1%) in 2011, respectively. By 2030, people who are over 60 and 65 will account for 23% and 16% of the total population, respectively. By 2050, people who are over 60 and 65 will reach 430 million and 300 million, respectively (Kincannon, He, & West, 2005). Thus, since the older adult population is increasing dramatically, younger generations face an unprecedented …show more content…

In 1980, the government established the one-child policy in order to control the population growth. Moreover, the Chinese government also stipulated an increase in the legal marriage age in 1981. Legal marriage age for male was increased from age 20 year to age 22; female was increased from age 18 to age 20 (Poston & Glover, 2005). The annual population growth rate, on average, was 1.3% from 1973-1985 (Qu, 1988). During 1990-2010, the annual average population growth rate was 0.57% (Peng, 2011).
In order to cope with the aging society, the government conducted a series of pension system reforms. The presenting paper is to examine China’s pension system. Due to the page limit and the complexity of China’s pension system, this paper only focuses on China’s urban pension system, and the rural pension system is not discussed in this paper.
Policy: China’s urban pension …show more content…

However, it was suspended due to the “Cultural Revolution” (Béland & Yu, 2004), which was a social-political movement that emphasis on cleansing the remnants of capitalist, traditional and cultural elements in order to reinforce the Mao’s ideology as an orthodoxy in the Communist Party and Chinese society. The pension system was established again after 1978, but it was a fragmented system that only a few people benefited from, such as civil servants and employees of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) (West, 1999). Thus, the majority of older adults had to rely on support from their families and typically their

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