Threatened by the aging of its population, China has announced that it will raise the legal retirement age to 63 for men and 55 or 58 for women.
China’s legal retirement age will be gradually raised, the official Xinhua news agency said Friday, as an ageing population threatens to plunge the country into a serious demographic crisis.
The legal retirement age for men will gradually be raised to 63, from the current 60, and that for women will rise from 50 to 55, or from 55 to 58, depending on the type of work done, the agency said, citing a government decision.
This increase will extend over 15 years from 2025, she specifies.
The new rules will also allow employees to “delay their retirement to an even later date if they reach an agreement with employers,” adds Xinhua.
China’s population shrank for the second year in a row in 2023, auguring serious problems for the economy, health care and welfare systems, with a growing number of senior citizens and a sharp drop in births. The new rules will allow workers to “delay their retirement to an even later date if they reach an agreement with employers,” Xinhua added.
“An inevitable choice”
From 2030, the minimum number of years of work that qualifies for a pension will increase from 15 to 20 years, at a rate of six months more each year. Before Friday’s announcement, state media had been preparing minds with articles extolling the merits of working longer.
“This reform will adapt to the objective situation, which is a general increase in life expectancy and the number of years of education in our country,” said an article this week in the People’s Daily, the organ of the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
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Raising the retirement age “is an inevitable choice,” Mo Rong, director of the Chinese Academy of Labor and Social Security, told People’s Daily.
This change “will lead to stabilizing the labor market participation rate (and) maintaining the momentum and vitality of economic and social development,” he said.
State media stressed that the decision was based on “a comprehensive assessment of average life expectancy, health conditions, population structure, education level and labor supply.” In China, hundreds of millions of people will reach old age in the coming decades, so the birth rate has declined significantly. The retirement age, among the lowest in the world, had not been raised in the country for decades.
“Demographic change”
The current age was set in a time of widespread scarcity and poverty, long before economic reforms brought improvements in purchasing power, nutrition, health and living conditions. But in recent years, the world’s second-largest economy has faced a slow-down of its economic growth, alongside a rapid ageing of its population and a crisis of birth rate, putting pressure on its pension and public health systems.
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The government “first proposed changing the retirement age in 2013 and there have been many social debates in the decade since,” Li Changan, a labor economist at the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing, told AFP.
“A lot of people [y] are mentally prepared.”
However, independent demographic expert He Yafu said the new retirement framework could not offset the “negative impacts of China’s aging and declining population on the economy, society and technology.” “The fundamental measure to address the aging problem is to increase the fertility rate,” he told AFP.
Disappointed young people
People aged over 60 are expected to make up nearly a third of China’s population by 2035, according to British research group The Economist Intelligence Unit. In addition, the country’s fertility rate has fallen well below the level needed to stabilise the population, despite efforts by the authorities to encourage births and the gradual easing of the one-child policy in recent years. Since 2021, all couples have been allowed to have three children.
But many young people say they are disillusioned with an economic system that they say increasingly rewards their intense study and long work hours. “I worry that we modern people are so competitive and distressed that our health will not allow us to reach” the new retirement age, Xinzi, 30, who works in marketing, told AFP. “My first reaction is: So when can I get my pension?”
