By CGTN's Hu Chao
China has the world’s biggest population, and the percentage of senior citizens out of the country's 1.4 billion people are increasing at an alarming rate.
As forecast by the World Health Organization, by 2050, China will become the oldest country in the world, with 35 percent of its population over 60 years old.
Percentage of population over 60 in major countries / CGTN Picture
In order to ease the demographic change, China ended its decades-long one-child policy and began fully implementing a new second-child policy in 2016. But many experts say the new approach will not be good enough to address the problem of China's aging society.
According to China’s National Bureau of Statistics, over 10 percent of the Chinese citizens were over 65 years old by 2015. According to UNESCO standards, a country with people aged 65 years and above accounting for over 7 percent of the total population is an “aging society”.
Percentage of world/ Chinese population over 65 / CGTN Picture
Professor Tan Kejian from China's Shanxi Academy of Social Sciences (SASS) has been researching China's demographic changes for decades. He believes that the second-child policy plays a little role in relieving the fast aging population. Second born children take up a very small proportion of the total population, and changing the population structure is a decades-long process.
Demographic experts have done a lot of research on the second-child policy. /CGTN Photo
Tan says the second-child policy will increase China's population by around 3 million people per year, and the country will experience a new peak in newborn children in 2018.
But China’s Total Fertility Rate has been dropping since the 1990s, plateauing at 1.5 percent in recent years -- well below the norm of 2.1 percent.
World Bank data shows China’s declining Total Fertility Rate. /CGTN Photo
Bai Ting, assistant researcher of the Population Research Center in the SASS, says their survey shows that 50 percent of the Chinese people say they will have a second child, but only 30 percent of them actually do. Families unwilling to have a second child are often concerned about economic problems as well as babysitting.
China has an unbalanced population structure. /CGTN Photo
As fewer Chinese parents decide to have larger families, some experts foresee government efforts to encourage child-bearing in the future.
Tan says that the second-child policy can hardly prevent the dropping fertility rate in China. He believes that Chinese women might be encouraged to have more babies for a balanced population structure in the future, like what many developed countries have done.
Having more than two children might be encouraged in the future in China. /CGTN Photo
Experts also say adjusting the population structure is not the only way to tackle problems associated with an aging population.
Tackling the problems from an aging population needs efforts from all sectors of society. /CGTN Photo
Han Caizhen, deputy researcher of the Population Research Center in SASS, pointed out that various sectors of society should make joint efforts to cope with the aging population. China needs to improve senior care industry, pension insurance, medical care and nurse training.
