Lei Xiangping

    lagon235@163.com

    WHEN asked why they had 11 children, a rural couple from Sichuan Province said that they would rather raise more children than save money for the future, according to a recent report by the Southern Metropolis Daily. This is not surprising when one remembers the Chinese proverb, “yang er fang lao,” or “bring up children so that a couple can depend on them when they get old.”

    However, this belief, mirroring the self-sufficient character of Chinese farming culture, is nearly gone now because most farmers have one child and more and more young farmers are moving to the cities to find work. Many left-behind elderly farmers are becoming poor and psychologically isolated.

    Experts say it is so expensive for the children of farmers to settle down in the cities that they have little money to send back home and they are too busy to go back home and help on the farms. Many elderly farmers can no longer rely on their children to help them in their old age.

    Fu Daxing, a 75-year-old farmer in Hunan Province, chose to commit a robbery in order to be jailed because he assumed that prison life would be more stable. Zhang Xiaodi, a deputy for the Shanghai Municipal People’s Congress, once wrote, “an aged farmer’s lifestyle is very tedious: what can they do except watch the sun at daytime and observe the moon at nighttime?”

    The State Statistics Bureau says that as of 2014, China had about 212 million elderly people, men over 60 years of age and women over 55 years of age, with over 120 million living in rural areas.

    The question is, what should China do to support elderly farmers? “Yang er fang lao” is a thing of the past. The rural population should be covered by the social security safety net.

    The Chinese Government is showing more and more attention to the rural aging problem. In 2008, China issued the New Rural Endowment Insurance System, which purportedly covers 95 percent of the rural population and satisfies the “basic needs” of aged farmers.

    Under this system, aged farmers get a humble assistance of 55 yuan (US$9) per month, which is almost all paid by the Central Government. Medical care is partially covered either by supplementary social insurances or by various low-income subsidies. Meanwhile, the Chinese Government has vowed to raise the assistance standard gradually by injecting more fiscal funds and experimenting with fee contributions from the farmers. More and more local governments have also increased spending on rural eldercare projects such as entertainment centers and reading rooms.

    Philip O’keefe, chief economist of World Bank’s China Bureau, says that as the biggest developing country, China has tried to cover as many farmers as possible under its elderly care system, and when its coverage is wide enough, China will invest more resources and money in supporting aged farmers. He believes China has made a good start in past years, but more efforts are needed.

    China’s rural aging trend is irreversible. A recent World Bank report says the rural dependency ratio, or the number of the aged as compared to the number of people in the labor force, was 13 percent in 2010, meaning eight young people support one elderly person. However, this ratio will surge to 33 percent, or three young people supporting one elderly person, in 2030.

    Since China is becoming an aging society before becoming a wealthy one, if we don’t want to see more farmers opting to give birth to more children like the Sichuan couple, we are obliged to earmark more fiscal funds and roll out more innovative policies to support aged farmers.

    (The author is an editor with the News Desk at China Radio International.)