The Communist Chinese Government has long decided that it knows best how citizens should live their lives. The famous one-child policy to control population, now lifted, was one of the most extreme government intrusions into private life.
Now China is reaching into its citizens’ pocketbooks with a new set of policies that both raise the age at which a worker can draw a pension, and increases the number of years a citizen has to work to qualify for one in the first place.
Over the next 15 years, the retirement age for men will gradually go up from age 60 to age 63. For women, depending on the job, it will go up from either 50 to 55, or from 55 to 58. The changes will start to take effect January 1, 2025, and the age increases will happen every few months in phases. Citizens will not be allowed to retire before the new mandatory ages, but they will be allowed to put off retirement for up to three years.
When the plan is fully phased in, citizens will have to have 20 years’ worth of work and contributions to China’s equivalent of social security before they are allowed to draw a pension.
The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences stated in 2019 that the nation’s pension fund will be bankrupt by 2035. But that estimate came in before the economic devastation of the pandemic.
The Chinese government conducted an analysis of the country’s life expectancy, average health, the structure of the population, and more, when coming up with the new policy. It is clear that years of the one-child-policy has contributed to the pension crisis; there simply are not enough young workers paying in to cover the expenses of those retiring.
Online commentators are skeptical that this will be the last change to the retirement system. One Chinese citizen writing on a popular Chinese social media platform said he expected that there will be new legislation in ten years pushing the retirement age up to 80 years old.
