Ord to retire
which is a desperate way for them to save themselves.”
If these migrants were to rely solely on China’s basic rural pension, they would live on less than the World Bank’s poverty threshold of $3.65 a day, though many supplement their earnings by labouring in the cities or by selling some of their crop.
Policy focus
China’s latest statistics showed some 94 million working people—around 12.8% of China’s 734 million labour force—were older than 60 in 2022, up from 8.8% in 2020. That share, while lower than in wealthier Japan and South Korea, is set to skyrocket as 300 million more Chinese reach their 60s in the coming decade.
A third of this cohort are rural migrants, who typically lack the professional skills for an economy aspiring to move up the value chain. The main reason China has not built a stronger safety net for them is that policymakers, fearing the economy might fall into the middle-income trap, prioritise growing the pie rather than sharing it, the government adviser said.
To achieve that, China is directing economic resources towards new productive forces, a catch-all term for President ◣i Jinping’s latest policy push for innovation and development in advanced industries such as green energy, high-end chips and quantum technology. U.S. and European o¨cials say this policy is unfair to Western rms competing with Chinese producers. They have warned Beijing that it stokes trade tensions, and that it diverts resources away from households, suppressing domestic demand and China’s future growth potential.
China, which has rejected those assessments, has instead focused on upgrading production, rather than consumption, as its desired path toward prosperity.
Economists at Nomura say transferring resources to the poorest Chinese households is the most e¨cient way to boost domestic consumption.
But the rural pension hike amounts to an annual eort of less than 0.001% of China’s $18 trillion GDP.