Growing Old The Hard Way: China, Russia, India

Policy Review, Apr/May 2006 by Eberstadt, Nicholas

With official government pension guarantees a distinctly more limited and problematic set of options than official policy might wish, and with the traditional social security system known as "the Chinese family" a rather more fragile construct than at any time in the recent past, the grim reality may be that a great many elderly Chinese men and women in the coming decades will have to come to the conclusion that they must sustain themselves by continuing to work. Paradoxically, despite China's tremendous material progress over the half-century beginning in 1975, the nation's elderly will face a continuing need - quite possibly a growing need - to support themselves in old age through their own labor.

But China's elderly population is not ideally placed as competitors in their country's labor markets - either today or tomorrow. And here we enter into the second constraint of China's tightening "triple bind." China's elderly workers occupy a decidedly unfavorable position in the country's labor force today. At the start of the new century, in comparison with China's overall workforce, workers 6 5 or older are six times as likely to be illiterate or semiliterate, almost 50 percent more likely to have only primary education, and only a tenth as likely to have a high school or college diploma. They are also much more likely to toil in the agricultural sector: In 2.000, 87 percent of China's elderly workers were in farming, as opposed to 66 percent for the workforce as a whole.10 Thus consigned to the low-income sector of the economy, to labor there with low levels of human capital, China's older labor force provides almost a textbook definition for the working poor.

Despite China's educational advances, its older population will still be disadvantaged in 2005. We know this because we have data today on the educational attainment of the people who will make up China's elderly cohorts 20 years from now As of 202.5, something like two-fifths of China's senior citizens will have a primary school education - or less. That circumstance contrasts starkly with prospects for today's developed countries: In both Japan and the United States, for example, nearly five-sixths of the 6 5-plus population will have at least a high school diploma in 2.025.

In 2015, moreover, the fate of China's low-skill older workers will still primarily be to toil in the field. Despite rapid structural transformation in the Chinese economy, agriculture promises to remain a major source of employment two decades from now - and older workers are likely to remain over-represented in China's primary sector.

The point to bear in mind about farming in China is that the occupation entails regular strenuous activity: It is not only low-paying but physically demanding. This point can be drawn more broadly, for even in occupations Western readers do not commonly associate with physical exertion, stamina and muscle-power are routinely required for job performance in China. This is so, quite simply, because China still lacks the capital investment per worker to provide "labor saving" alternatives to human strength in the production process. With mechanization so much more limited in China than in Western economies, the machines powering much of Chinese economic activity today are human bodies - and this circumstance is unlikely to change appreciably over the next 2.0 years.