China will “gradually raise” its retirement age for the first time since the 1950s, as the country faces an aging population and a shrinking pension budget.
The executive council on Friday approved proposals to raise the retirement age from 50 to 55 for women who do hard work, and from 55 to 58 for women who work hard.
Men will see an increase from 60 to 63.
China’s current retirement age is among the youngest in the world.
According to the plan passed on Friday, this change will start from January 1, 2025, and the retirement age will be increased every few months for the next 15 years. said the Chinese state media.
Retirement before the legal age will not be allowed, state news agency Xinhua said, although people can delay their retirement within three years.
Starting in 2030, workers will have to contribute again to the social security system in order to receive pensions. By 2039, they will have to complete 20 years of contributions to receive their pension.
The state-run China Academy of Social Sciences said in 2019 that the state’s massive pension fund would run out of money by 2035 – and that was an estimate before the Covid-19 pandemic, which hit China’s economy hard.
The plan to raise the retirement age and adjust the pension policy was based on a “comprehensive assessment of life expectancy, health conditions, population structure, education level and labor supply in China,” Xinhua reported.
But the announcement drew skepticism and discontent on the Chinese Internet.
“In the next 10 years, there will be another bill that will delay retirement until we are 80,” wrote one user on the Chinese social media site Weibo.
“What a bad year! Middle-aged workers are facing wage cuts and retirement age. Those who are unemployed are finding it harder to find jobs,” said another.
Others said they were expecting this announcement.
“This was expected, there is not much to discuss.
“Men in many European countries retire at the age of 65 or 67, while women retire at 60. This will be the norm in our country as well,” said one Weibo user.
China’s population will decline for the second year in a row in 2023 as its birth rate continues to decline.
Meanwhile, the average age of its life has increased to 78.2 yearssaid officials earlier this year. According to the World Health Organization, nearly a third of China’s population – about 402 million people – will be over 60 years of age by 2040, up from 254 million in 2019.
The recession, shrinking government benefits and the decades-long one-child policy are creating a growing demographic crisis in China, our China correspondent Laura Bicker wrote earlier this year.
China’s pension pot is drying up and the country is running out of time to build an adequate fund to care for its aging population.
In the next decade, about 300 million people, currently in their 50s to 60s, are expected to leave China’s workforce. This is the largest age group, roughly the size of the US population.
So who will be looked after? The answer depends on where you go and who you ask.
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