During our third week in Beijing, we split up into small groups again for case studies. Only equipped with ourselves and our fellow Chinese-student translators, we set up meetings and site visits for our research. With my group, I got a further look into senior care issues.
On our first day we traveled to a local nursing home which had an incredibly large (though unfortunately incredibly overworked) staff. The elderly there seemed to be very much dependent on the very good care they were receiving, and their livelihood and smiling faces were infectious! While there, we got the chance to hear them sing Chinese songs for us, and we returned the gesture with one of our own! Other rewarding experiences of the week include interviewing a popular journalist for an elderly health newspaper and a medical research professor about the difficulties the country is facing as it increasingly becomes an aging and elderly society. We also took a trip to a nearby park one morning and observed older community members doing Tai Chi (some groups with swords and fans) using the many outdoor exercise and stretching machines and practicing Chinese calligraphy on the cement sidewalks using a life-size paintbrush and a bucket of water.
Because it is part of our curriculum to synthesize our experiences in each country we travel to through a research paper, it became my personal endeavor to explore the conditions surrounding and affecting the growing elderly population in China. Every piece of data we collected affirmed that these shifting demographics will amount to a huge problem in the very near future. The government's political persistence with the One Child Policy is beginning to leave more and more of the nation's elderly without enough family support to provide for their needs. The opening of China's market to the global economy has introduced a sense of capitalistic individualism which has done everything from pulling younger generations away from their families to pursue their own lives and careers, to increasing the privatization (and thus, the cost) of health care facilities and services, to introducing a drastic and unforeseen inflation in the price of everyday necessities. With policies that demand a decrease in family size for population control, and modernization which undermines Confucian emphasis on familial piety in society, traditional values are being replaced with a new-age way of life that leaves the elderly behind.
Younger family members are beginning to provide their parents with mostly monetary support over social support (a large change from past times) which produces and is reflected by the boom in nursing home businesses. This in itself is a problem because it introduces a demand in labor that is most often filled by migrant workers who are underpaid and severely overworked. This means that those from rural areas who are less socially and financially empowered are bearing the brunt of the problem, having to leave their own elderly family members behind to take care of those in the crowded cities. Also, because the government enforces a retirement age of 55 for women and 60 for men due to the fact that the average life expectancy is continuously increasing, and because inflation is on the rise, the elderly who are most often unable to generate any substantial income are at a loss. We spoke to one man who told us "you just go to the grocery store hoping you can afford the vegetables that day."
This whole phenomenon has pushed many older people to pursue work through building entrepreneurships, something that has added the stress of economic competition at a time in their lives when they are arguably least likely to be able to learn a new trade.
Solutions to the problem have been fiddled around with here and there and have generally called for one of two actions- governmental revision of the One Child Policy to rebuild families and enable them to support their own elderly, or increased government funding for public nursing homes and other health care programs for the elderly so that their livelihoods may be placed in the hands of the community. But either way, the numbers don't add up. Within the next 20 years, as the masses whose reproduction was restricted enter old age, and when we will see the most extreme exacerbation of the consequences, there will be neither enough young people within individual families nor across the overall society to aid the immediate situation.
The saying, "China will get old before it gets rich" rings clearer in my mind than the theory that it will be one of the world's next superpowers. But even if the most populous country drops out of the running, it is no less a threat to the world's current superpowers. Whether China does continue on the path to economic self-sufficiency and no longer needs to rely on its exports for income, or whether its economy becomes run down from bearing the weight of the elderly population, it is inevitable that the Western world will suffer if it continues to exploit the country and its people for the provision of cheap goods. I can really only hope, for both ethical and practical reasons, that we start to see more "Made in the U.S." stickers.
