Chinese Farmers Hit Hardest by New Retirement Scheme, Experts Say

A farmer ploughs among rice seedlings in a field at the Xiahe Village in the outskirts of Nanjing of Jiangsu Province, China, on June 12, 2007. China Photos/Getty Images

The Chinese regime’s decision to raise China’s minimum retirement age will impact more than 400 million people, according to data from its National Bureau of Statistics. This will leave older Chinese with fewer years to enjoy their pensions and more years to contribute.

That would put over 200 million Chinese elderly farmers in a tough spot. Unlike urban workers, whose pension plan began in 1978, farmers didn’t become eligible until 2009.

Analysts said the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is passing its pension plan failure on to the general public, especially farmers, who have been made to sacrifice the most under its rule. The latest policy change would likely bring more stress to a society already strained by income disparity and the current economic slowdown, analysts said.

In September, the CCP announced it was raising the minimum retirement age from 60 to 63 for all men, and from 55 to 58 for women in white-collar jobs and from 50 to 55 for women in blue-collar jobs. The implementation will be done in several-month increments and will be completed by 2040.

The Chinese regime is making the changes as it grapples with a weakening economy and growing debt at all levels of government.

Before the policy change, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences warned that the state fund used to pay for future pension obligations is expected to run a deficit in 2028 and be depleted by 2035.

In some provinces and districts, pension insurance funds were already running out. In 2016, at least 13 provinces and regions maintained less than one year of pension fund solvency; Heilongjiang Province’s accumulated balance, as an example, already had a deficit of 23.2 billion yuan (about $3.3 billion), according to state media.

Chinese Farmers Get Short End of the Stick

For more than half a century, Chinese farmers have been subjected to discriminatory treatment resulting from the rural “hukou”—a lifetime household registration that left them largely excluded from social security benefits.

The first pension pilot program for the rural population was initiated in 2009. It set a monthly basic pension of 55 yuan (less than $8).

This basic standard was raised to 123 yuan (less than $18) in March 2024, according to a working report by Chinese Premier Li Qiang. That is still dozens of times lower than the pensions received by urban employees. The latter, for example, receive a monthly pension of about 5,100 yuan (about $720) in first-tier cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, and 3,000 to 4,700 yuan (about $420 to $660) in other locations.

Rural subsidies vary between provinces and regions and may be cut as local revenues decline.

China’s rural population—about 56.6 percent of total recipients—receives only about 5.9 percent of the total payments granted under the social security system, Cai Fang, director of the Institute of Population and Labor Economics, said in a speech at the Tsinghua Forum in 2022.

Retired government officials consume a major portion of national pension expenditures.

Cai said that in Guangzhou and Shenzhen, for example, the pensions of retired officials range from 16,700 to 33,300 yuan ($2,350 to $4,700) per month.

In addition, pension funds are dwindling as more youth opt out of contributing to their pensions due to unemployment or disappointment with their economic prospects. In July 2023, a month after the CCP stopped reporting the youth unemployment rate, Zhang Dandan, an associate professor at Peking University, estimated that the figure then stood at more than 40 percent.

Given the chronic inadequacy of the social security system, elderly peasants face a survival crisis in their remaining years. Suicide rates among China’s elderly peasants have been high, experts said.

Liu Yanwu, a professor in sociology at Wuhan University, and his team have spent the past seven years researching the deaths of elderly Chinese in rural areas. Liu wrote in April that 30 percent of the deaths were suicides in a county he investigated in Hubei Province back in 2008, and that rate was “conservative.”

The root causes of suicide, according to Li, are mainly the lack of a basic pension and lack of access to affordable medical services in impoverished rural areas. According to him, elderly people who are incapacitated by illness and aging feel desperate and helpless, and fear becoming a burden to their children.

An elderly woman is eating a meal in a nursing home. China's one-child policy and aging heighten the shortage of elder care. Liu Jin/AFP/Getty Images

Apart from the social security system, CCP’s one-child policy, which lasted for more than three decades up to 2016, is also blamed for the challenges faced by the elderly in China’s rural areas.

The restriction of allowing only one child in each family has resulted in a smaller labor force and less economic capacity to support the elderly, said Cai Shenkun, a U.S.-based China affairs commentator on NTD’s “Pinnacle View” program.

Cai said many young Chinese have to leave their hometown to earn money and cannot take care of their elderly.

“Old-aged farmers are basically left to fend for themselves unless they can earn a living or have savings,” Cai said.

Chinese peasants are among those who made the greatest sacrifices for the CCP, experts say. Although they helped the party gain power in China, they were then severely squeezed in the country’s urbanization and industrialization process, according to Shi Shan, a China expert and contributor to The Epoch Times.

For example, the peasants of northern Shaanxi, where the CCP’s base was located, took care of military logistical supplies during the 1930s and 1940s, while sending their children and grandchildren to fight in the communist army.

Children were among those who suffered from the failed Great Leap Forward and subsequent famine. NTDTV

From the 1950s to the 1970s, during the period of China’s planned economy, the CCP turned to a strategy of resource extraction from the agricultural sector—lowering state-controlled agricultural prices at a significant cost to the farming population through reduced living standards and even famines—to secure for the regime its initial capital funds for industrialization.

Over the decades since the 1980s, farmers have lost their land amid the CCP’s push for urbanization and have been deprived of trillions of dollars of income, Shi said. This includes agricultural taxes, housing provident funds—housing deposit funds collected from employers and employees—rural education surcharges, fees for birth control, militia training, building township roads, and all kinds of taxes that local governments can demand.

Farmers bear the brunt of the striking disparity in the CCP’s welfare system, Shi said.

“[Chinese peasants] pay the most for but enjoy the least social welfare, including pensions,“ Shi said. ”There is no such thing as retirement for Chinese farmers; many of them have to work in the fields to make a living at 70 and 80.”