Population Is a Problem | Shanghai Is Older Than You Think: One Day in a Typical Aging Neighborhood

In this neighborhood, nearly one person in every three or four is over 60.

At eight or nine in the morning, once the commuters have gone, the Chicheng Xinyuan estate in Shanghai's Zhabei district settles down and more old people come out to walk. A sign at the front gate of the residents' committee office, long overdue for an update, says the estate has 1,296 residents aged 60 or older out of a resident population of 7,206.

Zhang Zhiqin, secretary of the residents' committee, told QDaily that the number of old people here has grown fast over the past two years, and that the share aged 60 and over is now somewhere between 25% and 30% — well above the 18% the sign works out to. She has worked here seven years and knows the place well.

Chicheng Xinyuan sits at Lane 760, Yangqu Road, in what used to be Zhabei district in northern Shanghai, between the Middle Ring Road and the Outer Ring Road, 15 kilometers from the city center. In the late 1980s, the Zhabei District Housing Office put up a large batch of apartments to resettle residents displaced by municipal construction downtown — among them the four separate estates that became Chicheng Xinyuan. Through the late 1990s, more families kept arriving from the city's shantytowns. In 2016, the four old estates finished renovation and merged into Chicheng Xinyuan.

To a real estate agent working an intersection away, Chicheng Xinyuan is a mature neighborhood. Mr. Zhang, the agent, grew up here. He told QDaily that the estate is close to a subway station, has decent amenities, and costs less than downtown, so some young people who work in Daning, three subway stops away, rent apartments here.

At the end of 2017, Shanghai had 9.73 million long-term migrant residents, and the great majority of them rent. This group, whose average age is in the thirties, makes Shanghai look far younger than it is.

CBNData, Yicai's commercial data center, calls Shanghai's 23- to 28-year-olds the "new consumer elite", and predicts their numbers, their spending and their purchasing power will all climb year after year — that they will buy more luxury goods, imported goods, upgraded consumer goods, and culture and entertainment.

All that vitality makes it easy to miss Shanghai's other side.

Figures released by the Shanghai Civil Affairs Bureau in 2017 show that 4.836 million people with Shanghai household registration (hukou) are 60 or older — 33.2% of the registered population, and 19.99% of the resident population. Shanghai is an aging city by any measure, and Chicheng Xinyuan is a small model of it.

For decades the people living in the estate have barely changed. As Mr. Zhang put it: "Whoever used to live here still lives here."

Just After Seven in the Morning

Ms. Wang, who lives in Chicheng Xinyuan, is 60 this year and has been retired only four or five years. Among the old people of Chicheng Xinyuan, she is still one of the young ones.

Retirement comes with its own drudgery. Ms. Wang's daughter had a baby not long ago and boarded the child with her. She has to hurry back to look after the "little one," so she doesn't dare stay outdoors long. In a few more years she will be like the other old people around her, spending every morning pushing breakfast into a grandchild's mouth and then walking the child to school.

There are plenty of schools around Chicheng Xinyuan. Tin Ka Ping Secondary School is right next door to the east. To the west are Baode Road Primary School, the private Pengpu Experimental Primary School, Baode Middle School and Pengpu No. 3 Middle School. Every morning it is mostly grandparents carrying the schoolbags — the first job of the day for many of the estate's old residents.

Most of them don't live with their children. The apartments are too small for three generations, but the work of raising the grandchildren still lands on the grandparents. A 2014 survey by the Shanghai Scientific Parenting Base sampled eight districts and counties starting in 2002. That first year, grandparents were the main caregivers in only 23.7% of households; by 2013 the share had shot up to 73.4%.

The job can last years. Ms. Ren is 70 this year, and although both her grandsons are already in college, she still has to see to her sons' meals. When a son is on duty at work, she cooks and carries the food over. In practice, from retirement at 55 or 60 into their seventies, old people keep a whole household running in place of children who are busy working and earning.

On the surface it looks as if the children's workload is the cause. Behind it lie problems that have piled up through decades of social change.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the Shanghai government encouraged companies to run their own nurseries and kindergartens, so that employees with jobs would not have to find the time and energy to mind their children. As companies were restructured, those nurseries and kindergartens closed one by one, and nothing was built to take over the work. Shanghai has about 250,000 newborns a year; in 2016 the entire city had 40 nurseries, with room for just over 6,000 children. Private kindergartens absorb some of the demand, but how their licenses are policed is a hidden danger.

When public services fall short, the cost lands on children and the old. Grandparents have had to take on more of the raising. In any tally of what it costs to bring a child from infancy to adulthood, this is the item that is hard to price and easy to overlook.

The old are not necessarily willing to carry the family this way. At 60, Ms. Wang is young enough to have the energy for a small child. Ms. Ren says life is easier for her now — with both grandsons in college, she has far less to shoulder.

The Shanghai Scientific Parenting Base survey found that 48.1% of grandparents see minding a grandchild as no more than a duty they owe. Another 47.8% said the pressure was too much, and 46.7% said they were worn out and short of energy.

On the subject of raising children, 80-year-old Ms. Niu shook her head. "Raising kids was always a nuisance. Back when I was raising my two daughters, I already found it exhausting."

Nine in the Morning

Mr. Sun, 72 this year, has lived in Chicheng Xinyuan for more than twenty years. Mornings he wanders the estate, and when he stops he sits in the lounge of the Leling Home, the community's senior activity center, and smokes a cigarette.

As a young man Mr. Sun worked high-rise construction for the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, and came back to Shanghai only after he retired. For a few years after that he still couldn't sit still, and took a job guarding a nearby bank and handling its mail on the side. Now he has settled fully into the idleness of retirement. That ease rests on Shanghai's generous social security system.

Mr. Sun's pension is 3,800 yuan a month. He says he is "satisfied enough" with the number; a few dozen yuan either way doesn't trouble him. Nearby, Ms. Jiang, in her eighties, says her pension is a little over 3,300 yuan and her husband's runs to 4,000. Between them the couple takes in more than 7,000 yuan a month, and since "you can't eat that much anyway," they are "living pretty well."

According to the Shanghai Human Resources and Social Security Bureau, the average monthly pension for retired company employees in Shanghai in 2016 was 3,558 yuan, behind only Beijing and Tibet. A sampling survey by the city government put Shanghai's per capita disposable income in 2017 at about 4,900 yuan a month. So the old in Shanghai are financially no worse off than people still working. Nationally, Shanghai's pensions trail only Tibet and Beijing, and by a few dozen yuan at that.

Besides, the old don't spend much. Most of this generation lived through years of scarcity. One resident told a QDaily reporter: "You never had to queue up with ration coupons to buy things. Your mother probably did." Shortage and hardship shaped the character of a whole generation. Pointing at a bottle of disinfectant in the community laundry room, Ms. Ren said, "This bottle costs more than 100 yuan. There's no way anyone in my family would ever buy it."

Their children pick up some of the bills too. Visiting their parents and spotting the water and electricity notices lying around, they pay them on the spot. So the old look for whatever small openings they can find to give something back. Ms. Cao, who works at the residents' committee, manages to beat her children to the estate's parking fee and pay it herself.

In the short run the pensions are not a problem. According to a report from the responsible authorities, Shanghai's basic pension insurance fund took in 182.6 billion yuan in 2016 and paid out 165.3 billion.

But data from the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security shows that 13 provinces and regions, including Guangxi, Hainan, Hubei and Liaoning, have less than a year of pension payments left in reserve, and that Heilongjiang's pension shortfall has already reached 23.2 billion yuan. As the population ages further, those shortfalls will only grow.

Nationwide, the ratio of workers paying into pension insurance to people drawing pensions has already fallen from 3.16 in 2011 to 2.8 in 2016, and is projected to fall to 1.3 by 2050 — close to every single person having to support one extra old person.

That, though, does not appear to be a problem this generation of old people needs to think about.

Ten in the Morning

Ms. Jiang is on her way to the hospital. It is a routine follow-up to keep an eye on her condition, so she doesn't have to queue at dawn outside a top-tier hospital the way patients in a hurry do.

Over the past few years she has been through heart disease and three operations; she carries two stents and a bypass. The most recent surgery was nearly four years ago and the incision still aches. She says she is content with her life, but the moment her illnesses come up, the pain shows.

"We're old — which of us doesn't have some chronic illness?" Ms. Ren said. Health is the subject the old people here can never talk their way around. Which hospital is good, which doctor to see — they have even the most tongue-twisting drug names by heart.

An old man with white hair and a white beard, walking out of the community laundry room, fell naturally into telling Ms. Cao about his leg. It is a complication of long-term diabetes: blood sugar too high for too long damages the nerves and blood vessels in the limbs, which in bad cases means ulcers and infection, and in the worst cases amputation.

Ms. Cao urged him to take his medicine on time and in the right dose. He said he does take it on time and his blood sugar is under control, but the leg, which had been better for a while, has started hurting again. He sounded aggrieved. "Someone told me Ruijin Hospital and the Sixth People's Hospital are the best for feet, but you can't get an appointment. It's all over the television — scalpers. And now there's this booking online, and I don't know how to use it."

Ms. Cao pushed back. "Go to the hospital and there will be appointments. Just go earlier. My daughter works at a big hospital too — there's no way they wouldn't register you." But the old man, who lives alone, said: "My leg's no good. It's hard for me to get there by myself. Don't you think?" Then both of them fell quiet. After a while Ms. Cao spoke up again: rent out your apartment, and with the rent plus your pension you could move into a nursing home, where someone would go with you to the doctor.

China's much-criticized medical system is a heavy load for the people who need it most. "Everything else is fine, we just can't afford to get sick." Each of Ms. Jiang's operations cost 100,000 yuan, and insurance covered only about half. Even short of surgery, the drugs a chronic illness needs year after year add up.

Ms. Lu is a social worker who has spent years in community services. She told QDaily that as far as she knows, because pension insurance covers almost everyone in Shanghai, most old people in financial trouble are not short of a steady income. What pulls them under is almost always a serious illness.

Money is only part of the threat. What the old fear just as much is what illness does to the body. After several heart operations Ms. Jiang can no longer do housework — "washing clothes, mopping the floor, it's all down to the old man now" — and she needs her husband's company even to register at the hospital. "Now it's all on him to look after me."

For most people, growing old means gradually losing the ability to look after yourself. "We can't afford to hire a caregiver either — 5,500 yuan a month, we really can't afford it." Asked about the future, Ms. Jiang said: "If there's really no other way, one day we'll just have to go into a nursing home. We'll deal with it then. For now we get through it day by day."

Noon

Just past eleven, the old people head home to cook and the estate goes quiet again. A staff member from the seniors' association has finished her round of home visits, tucks a stack of forms into a folder and gets on her bicycle; in the afternoon she has a meeting at the subdistrict office.

The visits were to record who wants the "five-piece set" installed. Jing'an district fits out residents aged 80 and over who live alone with free infrared sensors and door sensors to track their movements, smoke and gas sensors to head off accidents, and a smart mat under the bed that monitors heart rate and blood pressure.

She had just gone door to door through Chicheng Xinyuan's old people living alone, explaining the policy. "Some of them want it, so I sign them up. Some don't want it installed, and we can't force it on them."

Her folder holds lists for handing out benefits and notes from the visits. She says the grassroots authorities have been laying on more and more for the old in recent years — milk coupons, vouchers for the vegetable market. Old people living alone whose income is below 3,500 yuan get free housekeeping twice a week. All of it requires her to gather the details and report them up to the subdistrict.

The government wants to pay closer attention to those aged 80 and above, and one of its methods is to send the younger old to look after the older old. In 2012 the Shanghai Civil Affairs Bureau launched the "Old Partners" program: one volunteer under 70 is paired with five people over 80 who live alone, and visits or telephones these "old partners" regularly for a chat. Chicheng Xinyuan joined the program and put together a team of volunteers.

The government would like the old to solve part of their own eldercare. A document from the General Office of the State Council once put it this way: "Advocate and guide volunteer activity in various forms and mutual-aid services among the elderly, and mobilize people of all kinds to take part in community eldercare services." This year's Government Work Report likewise called for "developing home-based, community-based and mutual-aid eldercare." The new phrase "mutual-aid eldercare" seems to mean something like the Old Partners program — the old managing and serving themselves.

Some take to it happily. Ms. Ren is on the Chicheng Xinyuan laundry team. "I put more into this than I ever put into my job. I told my son, 'I'm going to volunteer.' He said, 'Go ahead, Mom.' They're all fine with it."

Others see it as a burden. In a neighborhood near Shanghai Railway Station, a volunteer in the Old Partners program said: "Let's be blunt, the main thing is not letting them die at home. We call all the time — say he's not there today, so we call again? Two calls unanswered, we try the next day. What they're afraid of is falling at home."

"I don't like getting involved in things, don't like taking things on. I like doing my own thing at home; sitting and watching television is comfortable enough, right? Everyone's different — some people are thrilled, they get to go out, but I don't like it. Honestly, it is a bit of a burden. But there's nothing to be done. We can't be the ones holding others back, so if I'm asked to look after someone, I look after them."

Public services are thinner in eldercare than in childcare — nursing homes and other professional institutions, and housekeeping aimed at the old. According to 2014 statistics, Shanghai once set a target of nursing home beds equal to 3.75% of its elderly population, or 125,000 beds. Even that target of under 4% ran 17,000 beds short, a gap of 13.6%.

There are not enough caregivers in the nursing homes either. Zhang Fan, deputy director of the Social Welfare Division of the Shanghai Civil Affairs Bureau, says that by the standard used internationally one caregiver looks after two or three old people, while in China one caregiver looks after five.

Two in the Afternoon

Ms. Lu, the social worker, was born in the 1990s. She studied community public administration at university and joined a third-party social organization after graduating. Over the past year that organization has worked with a subdistrict in Jing'an district, running several of its "neighborhood homes" — community activity centers.

In the planning stage, Ms. Lu assigns each room of a neighborhood home a purpose: this one a reading room, that one a multi-purpose hall. Once it is built, she works with the residents' committee to draw old people in the neighborhood to the activities. For a long stretch, her most important job was organizing groups for them — dance teams, knitting circles — bringing in experts to teach, and sometimes taking them to compete at the subdistrict level and above.

What many old people need, Ms. Lu believes, is not extra money but things to do, enough of them to fill the long years of old age. She now moves each day among the neighborhood homes she is responsible for, organizing activities with the old people and lining up the people and money each one takes.

Zhang Zhiqin thinks much the same. If the old need activities, put on activities. But she doesn't think leaning on a third-party social organization is a good idea, so in Chicheng Xinyuan the residents' committee does everything itself.

Along the north edge of Chicheng Xinyuan there used to be a row of shops — a barber, a hardware store, all sorts. After talking it over with the shopkeepers, the residents' committee leased the space through the subdistrict office and converted it into the Leling Garden, a place for old people to rest and amuse themselves. It includes a laundry room that washes clothes free for the estate's very old and disabled residents.

Neighborhoods are taking on part of the eldercare burden as well. A notice issued by the General Office of the State Council in 2011 describes China's eldercare system as "based on the home, supported by the community, backed by institutions." Institutional eldercare — the nursing home — is meant to "provide specialized services mainly for the elderly who have lost, or partly lost, the ability to care for themselves." Home-based and socially provided eldercare are meant to complement each other, with the community supporting the in-home services that home-based eldercare needs and building places for daytime care.

To strengthen governance at the base, the Shanghai Municipal Party Committee has also increased its funding for grassroots bodies. Several residents' committees told QDaily that their budgets have indeed risen noticeably, and that staff pay has improved.

The money has gone into better conditions in the neighborhoods. The laundry room is one example. Chicheng Xinyuan's Leling Home has something scheduled every weekday morning and afternoon — dance teams, knitting circles, and regular health talks and blood-pressure checks. Ms. Lu's neighborhood homes have their own schedules.

But the effect is limited, and the Leling Garden in Chicheng Xinyuan is small to begin with. So some residents go elsewhere. Lingnan Park, near Baode Road, has just been renovated with middle-aged and older visitors in mind. From morning until night, old people work out along its fitness trail and sing and dance on the square.

Not everything can be handled at the neighborhood level, either. Zhang Zhiqin would like to build a canteen in the estate to solve the question of where old people eat. Between the space, the health permits and the running costs, that remains an idea.

More to the point, as society grows more atomized, it gets harder to draw old people into anything. One of Ms. Lu's neighborhood homes sits in a resettlement estate where neighbors were once fairly close, and by her estimate no more than 20% of the old residents take part in community activities. Another, in a commercial housing estate, often has nobody inside for a whole afternoon but the volunteer on duty.

Delivering services to old people through residents' committees and third-party social organizations is not easy work.

Seven Thirty in the Evening

Mr. Shi, 25, is a middle school teacher. He lives in an aging neighborhood and looks blank when asked about anything going on in it. Every day he comes home from school, buys groceries, cooks. Once things settle, "I shut myself in my room. I don't go out and wander around."

He doesn't know that seven thirty in the evening is exactly when the old people are out. The fitness trail in Lingnan Park is packed. Since the park bans amplified music at night, the ones who like to dance have moved onto the sidewalk outside. In a single short block there is one square-dancing team and three ballroom-dancing teams. The music doesn't thin out until after half past eight.

"If I went out for a walk I'd probably see it," he says of the square dancing. But at that hour Mr. Shi is usually in his room playing games — the battle royale hit PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, known in China as "eating chicken," and the more obscure mobile game Dragon Nest. Even when he goes shopping with his wife, they head for a mall, not somewhere like Lingnan Park.

In daily life the young and the old are almost sealed off from each other. "We don't normally run into each other, and when we do it's a nod hello." Mr. Shi said, "Work is usually busy, and even when it isn't, we find other things to do with our time. People our age don't really get involved in the community."

Through the pension system, though, the old and the young are bound together whether they like it or not. Mr. Shi has a good deal to say about it: "The government makes you pay into the pension fund and the occupational annuity. The pension is 7%, the annuity 4%. It's a heavy load, especially for us teachers — what comes out every month really adds up."

A pension system in which "the young pay in and the old are paid out" has become an unspoken cycle. When the young grow old, new young people will pay for them. The whole thing runs on an endless supply of young people not yet born.

The trouble is that there are fewer and fewer of them. Shanghai's total fertility rate has fallen to 0.73, meaning the average woman of childbearing age will have 0.73 children. Keep that up and Shanghai's population must shrink.

Meanwhile Shanghai has for years been the oldest of China's major cities. In 2014, 28.8% of its people were elderly, against 26% in Nantong and 24.1% in Suzhou, the second- and third-ranked cities, and a national average of 15.5%.

Yin Zhigang, director of the Shanghai Research Center on Aging, forecasts that the number of the very old in Shanghai will climb steeply from 2025 to 2050, and that the resident elderly population will pass 10 million by 2050. That would put the share of elderly residents above 40%, close to 50%.

To meet the crisis, bringing in younger migrants looks like one option. In a 2011 report, Characteristics and Trends of Shanghai's Population Development, the Shanghai Bureau of Statistics wrote: "Among the city's resident population aged 15 to 39, people who came from other provinces account for 56.9%, more than those with local household registration. The large inflow of young migrants has strengthened the vitality of Shanghai's population and, to a degree, slowed the pace of its aging."

Zhou Haiwang, deputy director of the Institute of Urban and Demographic Studies at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, has said that by 2050 Shanghai will need to bring in more working-age people to hold up an increasingly old population structure. In his view the resident population needs to reach at least 35 million. To get there, Shanghai would have to add 45% to its current 24 million.

Yet in recent years Shanghai has kept tightening population controls. In 2015 its resident population fell for the first time. China Economic Weekly, citing someone involved in the population survey, reported: "For several years Shanghai has been pushing 'emptying the cage for new birds,' moving coastal labor-intensive industry inland, so it stands to reason that some of the population is flowing back out of Shanghai."

At the end of December 2017, the State Council approved Shanghai's master urban plan, requiring strict control of the city's size: by 2035 the resident population is to be held at around 25 million, roughly 10 million below Zhou Haiwang's figure. Continuing the decline that began in 2015, the city's resident population stood at 24.1833 million at the end of 2017, 13,700 fewer than a year earlier.

Next: Where Have All the Young People in a Small Northeastern City Gone

Cover image from Douban.