The Best Way to Care for the Aged: Put them to Work?

     Two articles in People's Daily raise some interesting questions when read together.

    First, we have "China expects communities to take more care of elderly people," which tells us:

China is encouraging communities to provide services for the elderly, as pressure grows on retirement homes and individual families.

"Community services can be easily organized in neighborhoods where residents have friendly relations and tend to help each other," said Guo Ping, deputy director of the China Research Center on Aging.

He suggested communities set up special teams to pay regular visits to the elderly at home, offering cleaning, laundry and medical care services.

 Which is made to sound like a culturally appropriate social benefit:

Deeply influenced by the traditional value that children should support their elderly parents and guarantee them a happy life, many Chinese seniors are reluctant to leave home and live in retirement homes.

However, with many Chinese families now having a "four parents, one couple and one child" structure, young people are shouldering a heavier burden supporting the elderly.

Experts recommend that senior citizens live at home and be taken care of by their communities. It is a solution that suits China's situation and its traditions.

      Perhaps.  But this may simply be putting a Confucian gloss on an unwieldy modern problem.  I have a sneaking suspicion that "communities" will be under the same kinds of economic pressure as "children" - people having to devote more time to work to earn enough to secure basic living necessities in a growing economy with increasing costs and competitiveness - and that this nice-sounding idea will not get very far in dealing with the exploding issue of China's aging society.  And that is the topic of the next article: "Who will support China's development in 50 years?"

     This makes Japan, with its rapidly graying society, a vision of China's future:

Researchers Cai Chuang and Wang Meiyan from CASS found that between 2000 and 2030, the average age of the labor force would also increase. It's predicted that in 2013, the number of workers as a percentage of the population will peak at 72.1 percent. But the actual size of the working population will peak at 997 million in 2016. According to UN estimates, the number of Chinese people of working age will gradually fall below the world average. These estimates indicate that China's outlook is not optimistic. China will lose its economic advantage of cheap labor in the near future.

Unfortunately, China's demand for labor will continue to grow for some time. It is the labor-intensive manufacturing and processing industries that have given China such an advantage in the world economy. Without labor, these industries will collapse. China needs a long time if it is to change its mode of production mode and as yet there haven't been any signs of readjustment.

In fact CASS's report says that there is no need to wait for the problem to actually develop, as it has already been anticipated. Since 2004, China's most vital development area, the Pearl River Delta, has experienced a shortage of labor. The Yangtze River Delta has also had this problem.

     So, we have two problems: taking care of old folks and maintaining the labor pool.  One answer seems obvious: put the old folks to work!  There might be even more problem squaring this with Confucian ethics, but, hey, necessity is the mother of invention (is there a Chinese saying for that?).

      At first, I thought this was just a goofy idea, a bad joke at the expense of Confucians.  But the more I think about it...

     With technology changing the nature of work more and more, why shouldn't we expect that older people, even those with certain physical limitations, have the capacity to maintain busy, productive work lives?  And why shouldn't we expect that many older folks might want to have some sort of job, something to keep them busy and earn them some money?  So, in fact, I think Mr. Guo should expand his horizons.  Why not an elderly training program to teach people how to use computers and the internet?  Why not an elderly call center?  It may not be cut-throat manufacturing, but it could be productive.

     Now, if only I could find a passage in the Analects that would justify keeping elders on the job (my books are in the office, but I'll see what I can come up with later...).

Comments

[windlotus]

It sounds like there needs to be something established there like what I worked doing for a while. Actually, we need more of it here!

A lot of seniors are put into care not because they're crushingly ill or utterly helpless, but because they need a certain level of assistance to remain independent, and there isn't time for family that works all day to provide it. The company I worked for provided the basic help that can make the difference between aged parents staying in their own or their children's homes and having to be put in a nursing home: cooking, cleaning, errands, companionship, and a kind of second line of alertness for the medical people who came out to see them.

As for seniors working, there's always the obvious justification in many cases: They *want* to work. We're not talking digging ditches here, but retirement is the death knell for a lot more people than I think is commonly realized, because they stop feeling like they're useful in the world, and for someone who might have worked 40 or 50 years at that point that can be a crushing blow.