A Crisis of Young and Old in China's Birth Rate

Shanghai is rightfully known as a fast-moving, hypermodern city full of youth and vigor. But that obscures a less-well-known fact: Shanghai has the oldest population in China, and it is getting older in a hurry.

Twenty percent of this city's population of 13.6 million is over 59, the official retirement age in Shanghai, and retirees are easily the fastest-growing segment of the population, with 100,000 new seniors added to the rolls each year. By 2020, about a third of Shanghai's residents will be over 59, remaking the city's social fabric and placing huge new strains on its economy and finances.

The changes go far beyond Shanghai, however. Experts say the rapidly graying city is leading one of the greatest demographic changes in history, one with profound implications for the entire country.

China, which has built its economic strength on the basis of seemingly endless supplies of cheap labor, could soon face manpower shortages. An aging population may also damage the credibility of the Communist government, which manufactured this historic shift with its one-child policy.

Introduced a generation ago, the birth control policy, strongly enforced in urban areas, has spared the country an estimated 390 million births, but may ultimately prove to be a monumental mistake. With China's breathtaking rise toward affluence, most people live longer and have fewer children, mirroring trends seen around the world. But the extraordinarily low birth rate has created a stark imbalance between young and old.

That imbalance threatens the country's pension system. Demographers also expect strains on the household registration system, which restricts internal migration.

The system prevents young workers from migrating to urban areas to relieve labor shortages, but officials fear that abolishing it could release a flood of humanity that would swamp the cities and depopulate the countryside.

"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."

Even within China, Zuo said, many foreign investors have begun moving factories away from Shanghai and other eastern cities to inland locations where the work force is both 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 display. If Shanghai represents the future of China, it is in Jing'an - a central Shanghai district where about 4,000 people, or 30 percent of the residents, are above 60 - where one can glimpse that future.

Squads of lightly trained social workers monitor the city's elderly, paying regular house visits to combat isolation and ensuring that medical problems are attended to. At 10 a.m. on a recent spring morning, Chen Meijuan walked up a narrow and rickety wooden stairway to the second-floor apartment where Liang Yunyu has lived for the past 58 years.

"Good morning, granny," she called out as she entered the 100-year-old woman's small bedroom. "Did you have a good night's sleep?"

Chen, 49, earns about $95 a month as one of the 15 agents who are responsible for monitoring the neighborhood's elderly. Her caseload includes more than 200 seniors. "I usually pay visits to about five or six households a day, stay a little while and chat with them," Chen said.

After being introduced to a foreign visitor, Liang regales her guests with stories ranging across the decades of the 20th century.

"My daughter always invites me to live with her family, but I feel embarrassed to be with them," Liang said. "I'm worried I might die in her home, so I prefer staying where I am."

Her son, Zha Yuheng, a 76-year-old grandfather and retired textile industry worker, lives with her now, which also concerns her, she says.

"I am taken good care of here, but living with my son leaves him with a big burden, I'm afraid," she said.

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 the elderly population.

Zhang Minsheng opened the city's first private nursing home in 1998, a rambling, 350-bed affair in an industrial area far from central Shanghai that 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," Zhang said. "Now, from the standpoint of ordinary people, it is becoming a normal thing."

The average age of the residents of 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.

China has a patchwork of retirement ages, ranging 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 would be resented by many of the elderly, 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. And the government has already tinkered with that policy. It now allows husbands and wives who are themselves 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 that the leadership would resist more radical measures, because it is loath to acknowledge that one of the most ambitious social experiments of the 20th century, one conceived and carried out by the ruling Communist Party, was in any way a failure. 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.

By Howard W. French The New York Times