Thousands of Chinese retirees protest cuts to health insurance
Thousands of retirees confronted local officials and police outside a popular park in the central Chinese city of Wuhan to demand the repeal of recent cuts in governmentprovided medical insurance for seniors.
The protest last week, the second in Wuhan in a week, was the latest sign of strain on the finances of China's local governments, which are responsible for covering much of the cost of everything from health care to heating homes. China's “zero-COVID” policies, dictated by Beijing over the past three years, saddled those localities with additional costs, while a downturn in the real estate market eroded a reliable stream of revenue.
Video footage that circulated online indicated that large crowds gathered around Zhongshan Park in Wuhan, as police tried to divide them by imposing barricades. When police officers tried to push the crowds back, older men and women refused to back off and shouted in officers' faces. Some protesters sang songs like “The Internationale,” an anthem employed by both the ruling Communist Party and by protesters, who have used it to suggest that the party has strayed from its ideological roots.
In Wuhan, seven witnesses to the protest and two other residents described what they called a large demonstration during the day. One witness said he had seen police officers roughly detain protesters and lead them away.
On Thursday, a couple of hundred seniors gathered in groups at the same park at midday, angrily discussing their unhappiness with the health insurance policy changes. Security was tight, with plainclothes officers milling around, filming people as they talked. Nearly 100 uniformed officers stood behind crowd control barriers.
Social frictions in China may be reappearing as economic growth slows and the population ages. China has one of the world's highest levels of income inequality. The protest took place near a luxury mall with streetlevel stores for brands like Dior, Louis Vuitton and Versace.
The protests were about China's medical insurance system for urban residents. The system consists of two parts: a collective pool of funds and each individual's account. As part of a restructuring of the national health insurance system, local governments are reducing the amount of money deposited into the personal accounts.
Protesters who gathered Feb. 8 had vowed to return in a week if their demands that the local government restore insurance contributions for retirees to previous levels were not met.
The Wuhan government, in a document posted on its website, said that while it was true that the reforms would result in lower payments to everyone's personal insurance accounts, ultimately there would be lower out-of-pocket expenses for certain individuals, because the collective pool would shoulder more of a person's health care costs for routine hospital visits.
In addition to the protest in Wuhan, videos also surfaced online of a demonstration of retirees in the port city of Dalian, in Liaoning province. Last month, a crowd of retirees gathered outside government offices in the southern city of Guangzhou to protest the reduction in government contributions to their personal health insurance accounts, according to videos posted online.
Alfred Wu, an associate professor at National University in Singapore who specializes in political and economic issues in China, said the protesters, many of whom are retired government workers or employees of state-owned companies, were upset at what they saw as a broken promise.
They accepted years of working for low salaries with the expectation that they would receive generous health care and pensions in retirement. Workers in China also expected to retire fairly young by international standards — by 50 or 55 for many women and by 55 or 60 for many men, although it is common for retired older workers to take part-time jobs.
The trade-off on retirement benefits has become increasingly unsustainable in the face of China's looming demographics challenges, in which the number of old people is growing more rapidly than that of young people entering the workforce.
When COVID-19 struck, local governments had another financial burden: paying for extensive mass testing and quarantine facilities mandated by the central government.
“The COVID measures accelerated a problem that was already looming on the horizon,” Wu said.
Last month, hundreds of workers who had been hired for the government's mass testing programs took to the streets to demand unpaid wages. A month prior, medical students at universities and hospitals, many of whom were pressed into duty as the country's health care system strained to handle a flood of COVID cases, protested for better pay and more protective equipment.
Local governments across China are facing financial crises. In the mid-1990s, they lost most of their ability to collect taxes because of a government policy change. They were given broad authority instead to borrow money, or to raise money by selling long-term leases of state-owned land to developers.
Sales of land leases boomed, and were equal to roughly 7% of the entire economy's output in recent years. Even that money was not enough to pay for local governments' extensive investments in roads, bridges, rail lines, urban parks and other projects.