Double Ninth Festival or Chongyang Festival is celebrated on the 9th day of the ninth month on the Chinese lunar calendar, which falls on October 4 this year. 

It has long been a day for the Chinese to show care and love to the elderly. It is also a traditional folk holiday focused on good health and long life, with various festivities. Many of the celebrations are inherited from the past, including visiting the elderly, admiring chrysanthemums, drinking chrysanthemum wine or tea, wearing cornel twigs and climbing to the highlands.

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What to eat, drink and do during the Double Ninth Festival

As part of the efforts to deal with the aging population and better protect the rights and interests of the elderly, China passed a new law stipulating that family members should pay regular visits to their elderly relatives. The ruling, which came into force on July 1, 2013, stipulates that the ninth day of the ninth lunar month is the national festival for the elderly. 

According to the National Bureau of Statistics, China had more than 200 million people aged 65 and above in 2021, accounting for 14.2 percent of the total population. Over the past decade, the proportion of people aged 65 and above in China increased by over 5 percent.

China has made lots of achievements in elderly care services over the past 10 years, and China's social security system for the elderly has been continuously improved to ensure that senior citizens enjoy a peaceful life, said Wang Haidong, director of the aging health department of China's National Health Commission at a press conference in September.

As of the end of 2021, over one billion people in China were covered by basic pension insurance and 1.36 billion were covered by medical insurance.

"By 2025, the country's basic pension insurance coverage will reach 95 percent," according to a release by the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security in 2021.

Solid progress has been made in building a living and health care service system for the elderly. As of the first quarter of 2022, around 360,000 elderly care institutions and facilities had been established across the country, with the number of beds nearly doubling to 8.13 million from 2012. 

By the end of 2021, about 40 million elderly benefited from China's elderly allowance, and 38.6 billion yuan ($6.0 billion) was spent on elderly welfare and 14.5 billion ($2.2 billion) on elderly care services nationwide. 

China will steadily improve its social security benefits and other social safety-net programs during the 14th Five-Year Plan period (2021-2025), the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security said.