China’s ageing rural peasants labour into their twilight years as pensions ‘cover only oil and salt’
- The lack of support for elderly rural residents has become a worsening socio-economic problem for China amid its rapid urbanisation push
- Decades of aggressive family-planning measures mean one out of four residents in the countryside will be older than 60 by 2025
Chen Yunfeng, the chief of Yancang village in Henan province, has grown dismayed by the disadvantages that ageing rural peasants face in Chinese society.
“We plant grains, but grains are cheap,” Chen said while puffing cigarettes under a no-smoking sign in his little office. “And we are getting old, but there’s little welfare.”
According to Chen, who is in his late fifties, a peasant from the village can receive a monthly pension of just 112 yuan (US$16) after the retirement age of 60 – a tiny sum that is well below the average daily wage in Chinese cities and far from enough to support even a frugal rural lifestyle. It is also much lower than the national average pension payment of 2,000 yuan (US$290) per month for retirees from urban jobs.
The lack of adequate pensions for China’s rural residents is not a new issue. A secure retirement pension remained a privilege reserved solely for urban residents across the country until 2009, when then-president Hu Jintao and then-premier Wen Jiabao started to build up a national pension system for rural residents.
The rural pension system was merged into a nationwide scheme covering rural residents and urban residents who are self-employed or unemployed. The pension level varies in different regions but is generally much lower than that for urban residents. In Zhengzhou, the provincial capital of Henan province, for instance, the average pension for those enrolled in the urban and rural residents pension scheme was just 243 yuan per month in 2019, or less than a tenth of the 2,928 yuan for those in the urban corporate employee programme.
