On this still warm morning in early September, residents of the House of Happiness and Harmony are enjoying the shaded terrace, while loudspeakers play traditional music in the background. The facility in the town of Nanjiantou, about 100 kilometres southwest of Beijing, opened only four years ago and survived the difficult years of the Covid-19 pandemic, but its 150 beds are already two-thirds occupied. The operator has also opened another nursing home in a nearby village. “The market is growingexplains Pang Qing, the director. Most of the time children cannot be with their parents. »
The problem is well known in China: accelerated ageing. Chinese people over 60 have increased from 126 million in 2000 (or 10.2% of the population) to 280 million in 2022 (19.8%) and, according to estimates by the National Health Commission, could number 400 million in 2035. Development, together with the basic medical structures of the communist system, has significantly increased life expectancy, which has risen from 44 years in the early 1960s to 78 years in 2021.
At the same time, the demographic transition, accelerated by the one-child policy that took place between 1980 and 2016, has led to a drop in the number of births. And it has not gone away since, due to the cost of living and the lack of a real policy to support families. Today, it is therefore possible to find households in an inverted pyramid: four grandparents, two parents, one child. To deal with this situation, the National People’s Congress began discussing, on Tuesday 10 September, a bill to raise the retirement age, the details of which have not yet been made public.
Breaking with family ethics
Economic growth triggered a rural exodus that mainly affected the workforce: Chinese people left the countryside to work in cities or in new industrial zones. But now that their parents have aged, they are faced with a dilemma. Tradition says that they keep their elderly parents under their roof. But in order to maintain their standard of living, finance their children’s education and try to guarantee them a better future, it is impossible for them to leave these urban jobs to return to live in the countryside. Paying for a retirement home therefore sometimes seems a more obvious solution than putting the economic balance of the household at stake. At the House of Happiness, it will cost around 2,000 yuan (255 euros) per month.
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