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China's government did something last week that it hasn't done since the 1950s. It raised the retirement age. The workforce in the world's second-biggest country is aging and shrinking quickly, so this is an attempt to blunt the impact. NPR's John Ruwitch has this report from Beijing.
(CROSSTALK)
JOHN RUWITCH, BYLINE: The retirement age will rise by three to five years, depending on gender and occupation. At the moment, men can retire at 60 and women as early as 50. The changes will be phased in starting next year so that older workers get less extra time tacked onto their careers.
ZHANG YIGI: (Speaking Mandarin).
RUWITCH: To help people figure out when they'll be eligible, the government launched a retirement age calculator online. Twenty-two-year-old grad student Zhang Yiqi checked hers at a cafe in Beijing.
ZHANG YIGI: (Speaking Mandarin).
RUWITCH: She's going to have to work until she's 58, she discovered. We asked how she felt about it.
ZHANG YIGI: (Speaking Mandarin).
(LAUGHTER)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Speaking Mandarin).
ZHANG YIGI: (Speaking Mandarin).
RUWITCH: "It's like the sky just fell in," she says. Her friend says, "nobody's going to be happy about this."
But experts say the government doesn't really have much choice. Zhang Yi is vice dean of the School of Public Economics and Management at the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics.
ZHANG YI: (Through interpreter) The main idea with this policy is to ensure there's a labor supply in society. And, of course, increasing the labor supply helps ensure China's competitiveness in the world.
RUWITCH: Since people in China are living, on average, almost twice as long as in the 1950s, and they're spending more time getting educated, he says it's only natural to push back the retirement age. It also brings China more in line with other major economies. Dudley Poston is a professor emeritus at Texas A&M University and an expert in East Asian demography. He says there's a more pressing problem.
DUDLEY POSTON: Their pension pool, or amount of money they have, will not be around by 2035. So they needed to make some changes to keep people working longer.
RUWITCH: Many provincial governments are already out of money for pensions and heavily indebted.
POSTON: It will have an impact. It'll let some of the pension money last longer than 2035, but that's just a small piece.
RUWITCH: He says China's population problems loom large.
POSTON: I call it the demographic quagmire.
RUWITCH: The fertility rate is among the lowest in the world. The population is getting smaller and older, and China's hurtling toward a day when there may be more retirees than people of working age. Large-scale immigration could change the calculus, Poston says, but Beijing doesn't seem willing to pull that lever. He says, if trends continue...
POSTON: Then we're talking about China's population, by the year 2100, dropping from 1.4 billion down to 650 million.
RUWITCH: Not everyone is concerned about the retirement age, though, nor planning to rely on a state pension when they decide to hang up their spurs.
JACK XIN: (Speaking Mandarin).
RUWITCH: Jack Xin, who describes himself as an upper-middle manager at a listed e-commerce company, says the issue is getting a lot of press, but retirement is personal.
XIN: (Speaking Mandarin).
RUWITCH: "It also depends on one's work," he says.
XIN: (Speaking Mandarin).
RUWITCH: For people like him, who meet a certain income threshold and live in a first-tier city, retirement isn't really a concern.
XIN: (Speaking Mandarin).
RUWITCH: And the state pension doesn't pay out much either. So he says the best thing to do is work hard now and make as much money as possible.
John Ruwitch, NPR News, Beijing.
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