According to the proposal passed on Friday, the shift would take effect on January 1, 2025, with the respective retirement ages increasing every few months for the following 15 years, according to Chinese official media.
According to Chinese news agency Xinhua, persons would not be able to retire before the statutory age, but they can delay their retirement by up to three years.
Employees will also have to pay extra into the social security system to get pensions beginning in 2030. By 2039, they would need to have made 20 years of payments to be eligible for pensions.
The state-sponsored Chinese Academy of Social Sciences predicted in 2019 that the country’s major state pension fund would run out of money by 2035, and this was before the Covid-19 outbreak, which devastated China’s economy.
The decision to raise retirement ages and change pension policies was based on “a comprehensive assessment of China’s average life expectancy, health conditions, population structure, level of education, and workforce supply,” according to Xinhua.
However, the news has sparked considerable suspicion and resentment on the Chinese internet.
“In the next 10 years, there will be another bill that will delay retirement until we are 80,” one person remarked on Weibo, a Chinese social networking platform.
“What a miserable year!” Middle-aged workers are facing salary decreases and higher retirement ages. Another person commented that it is becoming increasingly difficult for jobless people to find work.
Others said they had anticipated the announcement.
“This was predicted; there isn’t much to say.
“In most European nations, males retire at 65 or 67, while women retire at 60. This is going to be a trend in our nation as well,” one Weibo user said.
China’s massive population fell for the second year in a row in 2023, as the birth rate continued to plummet.
Meanwhile, officials said earlier this year that the average life expectancy had increased to 78.2 years. According to the World Health Organization, about a third of China’s population, or 402 million individuals, will be over 60 by 2040, up from 254 million in 2019.
A population crisis is emerging.
A sluggish economy, dwindling government benefits, and a decades-long one-child policy have all contributed to China’s looming demographic problem, as our China correspondent Laura Bicker reported earlier this year.
China’s pension fund is depleting, and the government is running out of time to develop a sufficient fund to care for its rising older population.
Over the next decade, almost 300 million people aged 50 to 60 are expected to exit Chinese labor. This is the country’s biggest age group, about equal to the size of the United States population.
So, who will care for them? The answer is dependent on where you go and who you ask.
