In response to an aging population and growing pressure on pensions, the Chinese Communist Party plans to raise the statutory retirement age – which currently stands as low as 50 years old for some workers.
Unchanged since the 1950s, the country's retirement age is currently among the lowest in the world, at 60 for men, 55 for white-collar women and 50 for blue-collar women.
The superpower has the largest social security system in the world, with about 1.05 billion people paying into, or receiving payments from, its national basic pension at the end of 2022. Most demographers and economists say that the current pension system, which relies on a workforce that is shrinking to pay the pensions of a growing number of retirees, is unsustainable and needs to be reformed.
As China considers changes to the rights of workers there are concerns about the impact on businesses and how the solutions would be implemented. Ms Yang, a woman who only gave her surname and lives in central China working in human resources, told the ABC her company did not consider job applications from "old people".Emily, a Shanghai resident in her 40s who works in the legal profession and asked to use a pseudonym, told the ABC she was frustrated with the new reform proposal."Many people risk losing their jobs after 45," she said.It's left her concerned for her post-work financial prospects.
"It's a dramatic and often inhumane inequality. But I doubt anyone's going to bankrupt the nation or take on the urban elites to address it."Photo shows A woman walks along the footpath of an empty street in front of construction sites for residential buildings in the Kangbashi district of the town of Ordos in China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region
sparked debate among experts by suggesting that mass immigration, rather than raising the retirement age, could be the solution to defusing "China's demographic time bomb". Some analysts have said that the threat of a demographic crisis to China's society is overblown, and policymakers have been able to anticipate the population trajectory for years.
"We could reinvent the nature of work in middle age and later life so it isn't the same work, it isn't the same kind of burden," he said.
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