In rapidly ageing China, millions cannot a
After three decades selling homemade buns on the streets of the Chinese city of ◣ian, 67-year-old Hu Dexi would have liked to slow down.
Instead, Mr. Hu and his older wife have moved to the edge of Beijing, where they wake at 4 a.m. every day to cook their packed lunch, then commute for more than an hour to a downtown shopping mall, where they each earn 4,000 yuan ($552) monthly, working 13-hour shifts as cleaners.
The alternative for them and many of the 100 million rural migrants reaching retirement age in China over the next 10 years is to return to their village and live o a small farm and monthly pensions of 123 yuan ($17).
“No one can look after us,” said Mr. Hu, still mopping the oor. “I don’t want to be a burden on my two children and our country isn’t giving us a penny.”
The generation that ocked to China’s cities at the end of last century, building the infrastructure and manning the factories that made the country the world’s biggest exporter, now risks a sharp late-life drop in living standards. Reuters interviewed more than a dozen people, including rural migrant workers, demographers, economists and a government adviser, who described a social security system unt for a worsening demographic crisis, which Beijing is patching rather than overhauling as it pursues growth through industrial modernisation. At the same time, demand for social services is growing rapidly as the population ages.
“The elderly in China will live a long and miserable life,” said Fuxian Yi, a demographer who is also a senior scientist at University of Wisconsin-Madison. “More and more migrant workers are returning to the countryside, and some are taking low-paid jobs,