Tackling China’s ‘gray’ issue, or trying to

“I will stay in the nursing home when I cannot take care of myself to save you the trouble” is one of the most common pleas of urban Chinese in their late 50s and early 60s to their only child at home today.

But the government does not hope so.

According to research by the Civil Affairs Ministry, an ideal scenario of structure in China is for 90 percent of the elderly to live at home, 7 percent live with support from the community and family together and only 3 percent stay in public and private nursing homes.

The scarcity of public nursing homes and high prices of private retirement homes may also leave most urban senior citizens’ pleas unanswered.

In wealthy Shanghai, the average monthly pension is about $500, the highest of all Chinese cities. But a bed costs at least $1,666 a month.

Elderly farmers have it worse. They started receiving basic monthly rural pensions of $8.33 from the government from two years ago. More than 40 percent of them have to undertake heavy farm work, since their children leave to work in the cities.

And most of them live alone at home until their last days, when relatives and children come to take care of them.

Both urban and rural elderly Chinese fear the high medical bills of serious diseases.

They worry about exhausting all the family savings to treat the diseases. Foregoing treatment is usually the first choice when they are diagnosed with a fatal illness. Because of the lack of regular checkups, in many cases they go to hospital when late.

Educated in Maoism and starved by the great famines in early 1960s, this generation of elderly Chinese may be the most docile and obedient group of people in modern Chinese society, compared with their revolutionary predecessors and their Internettrained offspring.

Most of those in the cities wasted their schooldays in the Cultural Revolution (196676), were banned from having a second child in 1980s, lost their jobs in 1990s and exhausted their savings to help pay for their only child’s home.

The pension substitution rate for urban Chinese is only 40 percent. Life quality drops remarkably after retirement.

Paradoxically, most laidoff workers in their late 50s

it

is too and early 60s, who have to do various contemporary jobs for about two decades to make ends meet and pay their pension insurance, will not have their highest stable monthly income, until the moment they start receiving their average $333 monthly pension.

The old house in the matchbox apartment buildings they bought at a lower price from their units in 1990s becomes the only big inheritance they pass to their children, which is why the government meets considerable resistance in its call for the elderly to mortgage their houses to increase their monthly incomes.

In the other world of the country, farmers’ personal disposal income is about one third of city residents. The land collectively owned by farmers can only be sold to the government at a price the government sets.

In the government’s discourse on preparing for the aging society, elderly farmers are routinely pitted against city pensioners.

Abolishing agricultural tax, offering free nine-year education and covering the farmers with the basic rural pension and medical insurance make many elderly farmers believe this is one of the best times in their life.

Unlike the developed countries, a big challenge for an aging China is the people getting old before accumulating the wealth to enjoy a decent after-retirement life. In this context, there is a lot the Chinese government should do before country’s huge nursing demand becomes a business for private investors.