Shanghai ponders senior care for one-child parents

In five years time, Shanghai's first generation of parents of one child families will reach retirement age. Ten years from now, between 200 and 300 thousand such parents will be retiring annually. Many social policy experts believe that only children will be unable to carry on the Chinese tradition of looking after their parents, and the cost of taking care of the elderly will fall on the government.

Shanghai took the lead in implementing China's family planning policy. Over three million of the city's households, 60 percent of the total, have only one child, a proportion 40 percent higher than the national average. It now seems inevitable that the city will be the first to face a major problem of senior care arising from the one-child policy.

Sun Changmin of the Shanghai Family Planning Commission acknowledged that although one-child families tend to be better off, having less children would create problems with care of the elderly in the future.

The Population and Development Institute of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences says 2,300,000 only children will be born between 2006 and 2040, and within 65 years there will be more than 5,000,000, giving a total of more than 10,000,000 parents. It is anticipated that many of them will need social care services, and funding that care will pose a major challenge to the social security system.

Shanghai has recently made minor adjustments to its social security policy, setting up community organizations to support care for the elderly, and providing subsidies to families whose only child is disabled.

But with children becoming less able and less willing to look after elderly parents, many say the gap must be filled by a major improvement in collective provision. Zhou Haiwang of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, says the only realistic way to finance such a program is to establish a social insurance system.