As workers become scarcer and more expensive in the increasingly affluent
cities along China's eastern seaboard, the country will face growing economic
pressures to move out of assembly work and other labor-intensive manufacturing,
which will be taken up by poorer economies in Asia and beyond, and into service
and information-based industries.
"For the last two decades China has enjoyed the advantage of having a high
ratio of working-age people in the population, but that situation is about to
change," said Zuo Xuejin, vice president of the Shanghai Academy of Social
Sciences. "With the working-age population decreasing, our labor costs will
become less competitive, and industries in places like Vietnam and Bangladesh
will start becoming more attractive."
India, the world's other emerging giant, also stands to benefit, with low
wages and a far younger population than China.
Even within China, Mr. Zuo said, many foreign investors have begun moving
factories away from Shanghai and other eastern cities to inland locations, where
the work force is cheaper and younger.
As remote as many of these problems may seem today in Shanghai, the country's
most prosperous city, evidence of the changes is already on abundant display. If
Shanghai represents the future of China, it is in central Shanghai's Jingan
district, where roughly 4,000 people, or 30 percent of the residents, are above
60, that one can glimpse that future.
Squads of lightly trained social workers monitor the city's older residents,
paying regular house visits aimed at combating isolation and assuring that
medical problems are attended to.
At 10 a.m. on a recent spring morning, Chen Meijuan walked up a narrow wooden
stairway to the secondfloor apartment where Liang Yunyu has lived for the last
58 years.
"Good morning, Granny," Ms. Chen called out as she entered the 100-year-old
woman's small bedroom. "Did you have a good night's sleep?"
Ms. Chen, 49, earns about US$95 a month as one of 15 agents who monitor the
neighborhood's elderly population. Her caseload exceeds 200.
"I usually pay visits to about five or six households a day, stay a little
while and chat with them," she said. "For Grandma Liang I am a little more
focused, visiting two or three times a week."
After being introduced to a foreign visitor, Ms. Liang regaled her guests
with stories, ranging across the decades of the 20th century. She recounted the
arrival of Japanese invaders in the city nearly 70 years ago, her opening of a
kindergarten in 1958.
Liang Yunyu, who is 100, in her second-floor apartment. Her social worker
also visits more than 200 others.
"My daughter always invites me to live with her family, but I feel
embarrassed to be with them," said, pausing from her tales. "I'm worried I might
die in her home, so I prefer staying where I am."
Her son, Zha Yuheng, 76, a grandfather and retired textile industry worker,
lives with her now, which also concerns her. "I am taken good care of here," she
said, "but living with my son leaves him with a big burden, I'm afraid."
Mr. Zha protested that his mother was little trouble at all. "Every morning I
get water for her and make sure it is not too hot or too cold, and she handles
everything else on her own," he said. "She gets up, dresses, makes the beds and
even makes food for herself."
