Rush for Wealth in China’s Cities Shatters the Ancient Assurance of Care in Old Age

By Howard W. French | The New York Times
November 03, 2006

BAODENG, China — If having children is a mark of wealth, Gao Shenmu and Wang Xiuying, a farming couple in their 70s, surely rank as rich.

They raised six children in this rolling, fertile countryside before China imposed its single-child policy. What’s more, as the cities of the distant east flourished and boomed, three of their four sons migrated along with millions of others, landing jobs and joining the cash economy.

But for just that reason, their very Chinese dream of security in old age, built on the next generation’s obligation to them, has badly foundered.

The sons moved, but they left their own two young children behind to be cared for. They rarely visit and collectively send just $30 or $40 a year home. Mr. Gao and Ms. Wang make do at harvest time, spending two weeks in backbreaking labor that once took them less than a week to perform.

The couple’s experience is increasingly commonplace. The chief of their hamlet put its predicament this way: “Knock on 10 doors, and 9 of them will be opened by old people.”

And across much of the Chinese countryside the situation is the same, with villages emptied of their working-age populations, leaving behind small children and grandparents.

China is a rapidly aging society, but in villages like this, more than anything else the abrupt shift toward a preponderance of old people is driven by migration. Since the era of economic reforms got under way a little more than a quarter century ago, hundreds of millions of people have been on the march, most of them peasants looking for better economic opportunities in the urbanized east.

And as China’s economy has developed, old customs — like the ironclad obligation to venerate and care for the elderly — with roots in 2,500-year-old Confucian doctrine, are breaking down.

“The reality of China today is that the needs of the elderly cannot be taken care of by the social system,” said Zhai Yuhe, a member of the Heilongjiang Provincial People’s Congress. “Most of them must rely on younger people, but today’s young people pay attention to their own children, and not to their elders.”

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