As China ages, a push to add elevators offers economic lift
GUANGZHOU, China — When China faced previous economic slowdowns, it favored multibillion- dollar construction projects to quickly pump money into the economy. A bullet train network that now connects 700 cities. Ultramodern expressways longer than America’s interstate highways. And 81 of the world’s 100 highest bridges.
Now, a top Chinese official has a new idea to rev up growth during the coronavirus pandemic: elevators.
China’s premier, Li Keqiang, and his allies in the government want to retrofit as many as 3 million older, walk-up apartment buildings, projects that usually cost less than $100,000.
The downsized ambitions reflect the evolution of China from a youthful but impoverished country to a graying but increasingly middle-class one.
Although China still likes grandiose infrastructure projects, they no longer have the same economic effect. High-speed rail lines and superhighways already link every large city, so new ones connect smaller and smaller communities in China’s mountainous interior — at exorbitant cost. And the country’s debt has spiraled so high that it has become a serious drag on growth.
While elevators may pack a smaller economic punch, they provide a social benefit for a rapidly aging population. A wealthier Chinese society is also demanding more from its leaders.
Kong Ting endured nine months of pregnancy in a 10th-floor walk-up apartment in Guangzhou, the semitropical hub of southeastern China. Several times a day, she trudged up and down the building’s 162 stairs. “The hardest part was carrying food and drinkingwater,” she said.
Every day, she sat on the building’s third-floor patio and complained to the neighbors, many of them older. Last year, most apartment owners in the building chipped in $4,300 apiece, collected a large municipal subsidy and added a small elevator to the side of the building.
Buildings all over China need a similar upgrade.
As China’s economy started to open up after Mao Zedong’s death in 1976, young migrants moved en masse from the farms to newly built factories popping up everywhere. Over the next 25 years, Chinese cities swelled by almost as many people as the entire population of the United States.
To house the new city dwellers, municipal governments and state-owned enterprises hastily built nofrills apartment towers of seven to 10 stories across the country.
Almost none had elevators. China was still a poor country. It had few factories to manufacture elevators.
The lack of elevators is now a major problem in a rapidly aging society.
Starting this year, people born in the 1960s are turning 60, an age by which many Chinese retire. They have few children or grandchildren to help them, since China began imposing its stringent “one child” policy in the 1970s.
“If we do not prepare ahead of time, we may have a greater challenge than expected” as the number of older adults in China rises steeply, said Lu Jiehua, a professor of demographic studies at Peking University.
Without elevators, many longtime tenants become trapped in their homes, reliant on food deliveries and unable to meet friends or go for walks.
Guangzhou, a fairly affluent and socially progressive city, can afford to subsidize the projects and has already added about 6,000 elevators to older buildings— almost asmany as the rest of China combined. In Beijing, the prosperous municipal government pays almost the entire cost of elevator installations, offering a $93,000 subsidy to apartment buildings within the city limits.
Many less affluent cities have no programs for elevator installation or tiny ones. In far southern China, Zhanjiang offers a meager $3,000 subsidy for each apartment building.
The projects also are not universally appreciated, particularly by residents on bottom floors. Elevators usually block one or more of their windows and scarcely benefit them.