In all countries, even in China, the subject is inflammable. The Communist Party (CCP) nevertheless resolved, on Friday, September 13, to push back the retirement age, until now one of the lowest among the major economies despite an accelerated aging of the population. The reform, which will begin to come into force in 2025, will be prudently spread over fifteen years. But the retirement age will gradually increase from 60 to 63 for men, from 50 to 55 for women with manual work and from 55 to 58 for those employed in offices, announced, Friday, September 13, the official agency Xinhua.
Such a reform was necessary in a country where life expectancy, due to rapid economic development but also basic health structures, has increased from around 40 years in the 1950s to 71.6 years in 2000 and more than 78 years today, the same level as the United States.
“The previous ages had been set in the early 1950s. In seventy years, the economic, social and demographic situation of the country has changed enormously, and the needs of workers have also diversified, requiring an adjustment of the legal retirement age.”justified, Friday, the Minister of Human Resources and Social Security, Wang Xiaoping, during a press conference. For a long time, China was rather worried, on the contrary, about the scale of its demography. “Are there too many Chinese?” experts still wondered in the title of a Chinese book published in 2012. The large surplus of labor and the low life expectancy at the time explain why the retirement age was set so low in 1951, two years after the founding of the People’s Republic.
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The drastic one-child policy imposed since 1980 has had the effect of severely limiting births. Despite its abandonment in 2016, they are not picking up, particularly due to the cost of living. The number of births is even continuing to decline and the number of Chinese has fallen, for the second year in a row, in 2023. The share of Chinese considered to be of working age (16 to 59 years old) fell from 62% to 61.3% of the population between 2022 and 2023.
There are now 297 million people over 60, compared to 126 million in 2000. A study by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences highlighted in 2019 the risk of seeing pension funds dry up by 2035.
Prepare the opinion
The single party had already made it known in July, during its meeting giving the broad economic guidelines for the years to come – the third plenum of the 20the Congress of the Central Committee of the CCP – that a pension reform was being considered. The official press has been preparing public opinion in recent days. “Raising the retirement age is a major reform that is necessary due to the aging of the population and allows for the best use of Chinese human resources”explained the director of the Chinese Academy of Social Security Work, Mo Rong, to the Xinhua news agency on Tuesday, September 10.
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