Buried under scores of paragraphs, a single line in a new document from Beijing has shaken China’s workforce.
The country’s leaders, who convened last week to discuss their economy’s direction, revealed dozens of resolutions on Sunday — including their desire to raise the standard retirement age.
No specifics were given, and the resolution said any changes would emphasize being “voluntary and flexible.” Still, the signs are clear: Beijing is finally ready to shift a rule that’s governed lives for over six decades.
The move is deeply unpopular, as it has been in other countries, such as France, where workers protested a similar verdict in 2023.
People in China have taken the statement as the beginning of the end for a monolith of working life as they’ve known it since the 1950s.
As of Thursday, the hashtag “retiring late” has surged to 130 million views on Xiaohongshu, China’s version of Instagram. People took their complaints this week to Weibo, China’s version of X, in similar threads, which were later censored.
But experts and think tanks have long said this is a policy change that an aging China desperately needs.
China’s low retirement age
Women with blue-collar jobs in China can retire and collect pension checks as early as 50, and those in offices can leave the workforce at 55. Even the retirement age of 60 for Chinese men is below the world’s average of about 64.
“This was the standard set in 1951, but it’s outdated because if we look back, the life expectancy at birth was 43 in 1950 and then 48 in 1958,” Sabrina Luk, an assistant professor of social sciences at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, told Business Insider.
China’s life expectancy has now soared to 75.4 years for men and 80.8 years for women, according to official government statistics.
“This change was probably 20 years overdue,” Shaun Rein, the founder of Shanghai-based China Market Research Group, told BI.
“It’s ridiculous that people would graduate from college or from a vocational school at age 22, work for 28 years, and then be retired for another 30 to 40 years,” he added.
Luk, who researches aging in Asia, said Beijing could look at creating a national standard in retirement ages across genders. It’s currently running a lopsided policy of letting women retire up to 10 years earlier despite them living significantly longer on average than men.
“In almost every country, women outlive men by about four years on average,” she said. “In China, the women live more than five years longer than men.”
Some think tanks, including the state-run Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, have forecast that the country will aim for all workers to retire at 65. There is no official word yet on the new retirement ages or whether they will be standardized.
The pension problem
Key to the retirement overhaul are China’s pension funds.
Most Chinese workers receive a state pension, which can be boosted by retirement funds from employers and personal contributions. The state fund is by far the most relied upon by workers.
But the country, like the rest of East Asia, is aging rapidly. An estimated 254 million of its people are over 60, and that number is expected to grow by 2040 to 400 million, or more than the entire US population.
“This is a big problem for China,” Gu Qingyang, an associate professor of public policy at the National University of Singapore, told BI. “The state fund depends on government budgets, and this is highly dependent on the whole economy. And we all know China’s current economic performance is not that good.”
With more retirees to support and a dwindling young workforce to feed the funds, China fears it will run out of money to give out. CASS estimated in 2019 that pension reserves may drain completely by 2035.
And that was before the zero-COVID mandate, when local governments — who are typically responsible for funding state pensions — spent years pouring billions into lockdowns, quarantine centers, testing facilities, and swab kits.
By the time China emerged from its marathon against the coronavirus, some pensions were already running a deficit. Anger spilled onto the streets in early 2023 when at least four major cities started cutting medical benefit payments.
Delaying when people can start getting their checks could help relieve the financial crunch, though it’s still unclear if China plans to push back the pension age with the retirement age.
Experts say that either way, Beijing will need more than a simple policy change to fix its crisis.
“Can raising the retirement age really ensure a sustainable pension system? That’s a question mark,” Luk said. “It’s not that easy.”
China’s youth feel betrayed — should they?
The partially censored backlash on social media — and the lack of street protests — shows China’s youth perhaps feel the most disadvantaged by a higher retirement age.
Many are already underpaid or unemployed in a languishing economy, and there is a belief that letting older employees work longer will starve younger generations of jobs.
“Young people can’t find jobs and are not allowed to leave school, and old people are worked so hard that they are not allowed to retire. What kind of mess is this?” a Shanghai-based investment blogger wrote on Weibo.
“What about the employment rate of young people? If young people can’t find jobs and can’t support themselves, how can they get married and have children?” another investment blogger wrote.
The change has also spawned hundreds of memes on Xiaohongshu, such as one popular video depicting an old man working as a Louis Vuitton retail assistant.
However, experts say it is precisely the younger generations who stand to gain the most.
“The pension system is basically what the younger generation is producing to support the older generation,” Gu said. “The tax burden on them would have been very heavy.”
For many women, the changes estimated by think tanks could eventually see them working an extra 15 years. Still, Rein of China Market Research Group thinks the decision will have a net positive for them.
“If you had a man and a woman who are both 46, and she’s going to retire in four years, who are you going to promote?” he said.
