64 TheEconomistNovember 2nd 2019
1S
hortly after9am the neighbourhood
care centre for the elderly shuffles to
life. One man belts out a folk song. A cente-
narian sits by his Chinese chessboard,
awaiting an opponent. A virtual-reality
machine, which lets users experience such
exotic adventures as grocery shopping and
taking the subway, sits unused in the cor-
ner. A bigger attraction is the morning ex-
ercise routine—a couple of dozen people
limbering up their creaky joints. They are
the leading edge of China’s rapid ageing, a
trend that is already starting to constrain
its economic potential.
Since the care centre opened half a year
ago in Changning, in central Shanghai,
more than 12,000 elderly people from the
area have passed through its doors. The city
launched these centres in 2014, combining
health clinics, drop-in facilities and old-
people’s homes. It plans to have 400 by- “We can’t wait. We’ve got to do every-
thing in our ability to build these now,”
says Peng Yanli, a community organiser.
The pressure on China is mounting. The
coming year will see an inauspicious mile-
stone. The median age of Chinese citizens
will overtake that of Americans in 2020, ac-
cording to un projections (see chart). Yet
China is still far poorer, its median income
barely a quarter of America’s. A much-dis-
cussed fear—that China will get old before
it gets rich—is no longer a theoretical pos-
sibility but fast becoming reality.
According to un projections, during the
next 25 years the percentage of China’s pop-
ulation over the age of 65 will more than
double, from 12% to 25%. By contrast Amer-ica is on track to take nearly a century, and
Europe to take more than 60 years, to make
the same shift. China’s pace is similar to Ja-
pan’s and a touch slower than South Ko-
rea’s, but both those countries began age-
ing rapidly when they were roughly three
times as wealthy per person.
Seen in one light, the greying of China is
successful development. A Chinese person
born in 1960 could expect to live 44 years, a
shorter span than a Ghanaian born the
same year. Life expectancy for Chinese ba-
bies born today is 76 years, just short of that
in America. But it is also a consequence of
China’s notorious population-control
strategy. In 1973, when the government
started limiting births, Chinese women av-
eraged 4.6 children each. Today they have
only 1.6, and some scholars say even that
estimate is too high.
Fertility was bound to decline as China
got wealthier, but the one-child policy
made the fall steeper. Even though the
country shifted to a two-child policy in
2016 and may soon scrap limits altogether,
the relaxation came too late. The working-
age population, which began to shrink in
2012, will decline for decades to come. By
the middle of the century it will be nearly a
fifth smaller than it is now. China will have
gone from nine working-age adults per re-
tired person in 2000 to just two by 2050.
The economic impact is being felt in
two main ways. The most obvious is the
need to look after all the old people. Pen-Chinese demographyOld, not yet rich
SHANGHAI
Forget bad debts, the trade war, cronyism and autocracy. Demography may be the
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