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Beijing Sunshine Care House opened in January 2008, seeking to attract the city’s elderly with a tropical conservatory, billiard room and calligraphy studio. By the end of this year, the retirement home will triple the number of beds to 700 — and likely fill them all.

“It’s an industry with a great market,” says Zhao Liangling, Sunshine’s director, perched on a white leather armchair in her office.

Zhao’s expanding customer base reflects a potential threat to China far greater than the current economic slowdown. The world’s third-largest economy is aging so rapidly that by 2050, there may be only two working-age people for every senior citizen, compared with 13 to one now.

That increases the urgency of the government’s pledge to expand China’s social safety net and make retirement benefits and health care accessible to as many of its 1.3 billion citizens as possible. China’s graying also requires a cultural shift, as the tradition of families caring for aging relatives at home becomes more difficult.

“You can’t wait 20 years to start dealing with that problem,” says James Smith, director of Rand Corp.’s Center for Chinese Aging Studies in Santa Monica, California. “People will talk about Chinese culture having very strong reverence for people who are old, but relying on that is very, very dangerous, because in most places those values are really altered with rapid development.”

Baby Boom

A baby boom in the 1950s and 1960s was halted by draconian population control that began in 1979, reducing China’s birthrate to 1.7 children per woman from more than six in the 1960s. The first in that bulge of people in the prime working years –between 25 and 64 — is beginning to retire, putting a strain that will continue for decades on the smaller generation born since the start of restrictions on family size.

China’s elderly, about 12 percent of the population now, will reach 30 percent by 2050, according to Smith, who has helped to develop surveys that track aging in 25 countries. He says China is unusual in confronting this problem before achieving developed-nation status, unlike other places with an aging population such as Japan.

More than a fifth of Japan’s population is 65 or older and that may rise to more than 40 percent by 2050, according to the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research in Tokyo. The country’s welfare ministry plans to cut pension benefits 20 percent by 2038, a larger reduction than the 15 percent projected in 2004 because of the increasing burden on the retirement system, the Asahi newspaper reported in February.

Confucian Tradition

China’s Confucian tradition places strong emphasis on the obligation to care for parents. Many older people live with sons or daughters and take the main responsibility for raising grandchildren, typifying the expression that “children around one’s knees is heaven.”

Fewer than 5 percent of the urban old and 2 percent of the rural elderly live in institutional facilities, according to Zeng Yi, a demographer at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and Peking University in Beijing instant faxless payday loans. While such centers have mostly been a last resort of the childless or handicapped, that is changing.

Sunshine Care “is much better than living at home, there’s no comparison,” says Tian Baofa, 76, a former newspaper photographer. “I’ve learned to use the computer, I play billiards; I never in my life before played billiards.”

He and his wife, Ge Nianjiu, 67, moved in last month. Their daughter is busy with her job, and their grandson is cared for by their son-in-law’s parents.

A New ‘Path’

“As China develops, more and more people will walk this path,” says Tian, who pays Sunshine Care 2,300 yuan ($337) a month from his pension of more than 3,000 yuan.

He is among a lucky few. China’s pension system covered 205 million people as of March 2008, according to the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, or about 15 percent of the population. The government aims to boost that figure to 223 million by the end of next year, it said April 13.

Rural areas where the system is less developed face the biggest risk, undermining government efforts to narrow the wealth gap between city and country.

A pension program started in the 1990s covers only about 10 percent of the rural labor force, the World Bank says. Participants dropped by a third between 1999 and 2004, a setback Zeng attributes to the government’s shortsightedness and an assumption that families would take care of rural elderly — although he notes that official attitudes are changing. Family support is undermined partly by the migration of younger workers to cities, which has contributed so much to China’s economic growth.

Vague Targets

Premier Wen Jiabao pledged March 5 to expand urban and rural pension coverage and develop a system that allows migrant workers who change jobs frequently to shift retirement benefits. He didn’t specify how much will be spent on these efforts, and the government has left targets vague, saying only that the numbers covered by the rural plan will “expand year by year.”

Other initiatives include building four “demonstration bases” this year with investment of as much as 500 million yuan each in the cities of Beijing, Tianjin and Chongqing and in Jiangsu province, the English-language China Daily reported April 8. The centers will provide a model for the development of an elderly care industry, the report said. This year alone, Beijing plans to add 15,100 nursing-home beds, an increase of 43 percent.

Ma Li, deputy director of the government-linked China Population and Development Research Center, says the country still must do more.

“China is not yet ready for an aged society,” she told the official Xinhua News Agency March 10 “It does not have a complete old-age social-security system. There are not enough resources. Fiscal support is scarce. And the risk is ever rising.”

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