In many wealthy societies the very old are candidates for nursing home care.
That sector is still tiny in China, though, especially compared with the size of
elderly population. Zhang Minsheng opened the city's first private nursing home
in 1998 in an industrial area far from central Shanghai. It is now 95 percent
occupied.
"People were not willing to enter nursing homes in the past, because they
were considered places for those without descendants," Mr. Zhang said. "Now,
from the standpoint of ordinary people, it is becoming a normal thing."
The average age of the residents of Mr. Zhang's home is 85, and most live
several to a room, sleeping on narrow beds separated by flimsy partitions. Many
pass the daytime hours in long corridors furnished with chairs, where they chat
or simply stare into the distance.
The sheer magnitude of the aging phenomenon has Chinese officials and
academics grasping for answers, but almost everyone agrees that there are no
easy fixes. Population experts here speak of "patching one hole and exploding
another."
China has a wide range of retirement ages, generally from 50 to 60. Raising
the retirement age would relieve pressures on the pension system but make it
harder for young people to find jobs. And it would be resented by many elderly
people, most of whom have missed out on China's economic boom.
Lifting restrictions on internal migration raises the unwelcome prospect of a
mass migration, while abandoning the one-child policy would be politically
unpalatable.
The government has already tinkered with the policy. It now allows husbands
and wives who were their parents' only children to have a second child, for
example, and has eliminated a four-year waiting period between births for those
eligible to have a second child.
But Chinese demographic experts say the leadership is unlikely to abolish the
one-child rule, because it is reluctant to admit that one of its signature
policies was in any way a failure - particularly in view of the disastrous
population boom encouraged by Mao in the 1950's.
Moreover, lifting child-bearing restrictions might not help. Poorer people in
the interior might have more children, but the rising middle class probably will
not, experts say.
"More births would only change the structure of the population and prolong
the aging process" of the society as a whole, said Ren Yuan, a professor at the
Population Research Center of Fudan University in Shanghai. "But it has nothing
to do with the number of old people. The scale of this large group has already
become a reality. The beds you've got to add in nursing homes, the labor you
need to take care of the old, is a reality than can't be
changed."
