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Xi Jinping, who is 70 and has enviably thick hair, seems to recognise the challenges arising from China’s demographic decline. His 64-year-old prime minister, Li Qiang (hair receding, but putting up a fight), outlined a “vigorous national strategy” on ageing in his state-of-the-nation speech last month. We
cover all that
in this week’s issue. But I’d like to focus on the politics surrounding China’s predicament.
The great thing about autocracies, I’ve been told, is that pesky voters don’t get to distort policy. In democracies the electoral rolls are full of stubborn people who don’t want to work deep into their sunset years. That makes it hard to raise the retirement age in order to shore up state pension schemes. There is a reason why Social Security reform is called the “third rail” of American politics.
Chinese officials, though, need not cater to voters. Old people in particular expect little from the government. They’ve lived through some difficult periods, such as the great Chinese famine, the Cultural Revolution and all the times Jiang Zemin sang in public. Lauren Johnston of the University of Sydney calls China’s elderly the “suck-it-up generation”. As their numbers increase, the government could ask them to suck it up some more by raising the retirement age and making state pensions less generous.
For recent proof that the Communist Party is willing to neglect old people, one might point to the pandemic. The state did not adequately prepare before lifting its covid-19 controls in late 2022, leaving the elderly vulnerable. In the aftermath, over 1m people are thought to have died of the disease—most of them old.
But don’t be fooled: the Chinese government is more attuned to the opinions of old people than it seems. One reason it did not force them to get vaccinated before opening up is because it feared a backlash from this group, which has little experience with such jabs. Local officials worried that families might protest if their grannies were made to get a shot and then died of non-covid illnesses.
Last year thousands of Chinese retirees did indeed protest cuts to their benefits. Their children may be even less inclined to suck it up, having come of age during China’s boom years. They may expect to start their retirement at the same age as their parents did, and to spend it in comfort. If instead they are asked to make sacrifices by a government fearing demographic disaster, there could be consequences. In the decades ahead the party’s loudest critics may not be young liberals, but silver-haired seniors.
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