Over 30 Million Chinese Elderly Make a Living Doing Manual Labor

Farmers transplant rice seedlings on June 1, 2011, in Hubei Province. China’s Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security (MHRSS) made an announcement on June 5 that it will raise the retirement age for collecting pension payments. ChinaFotoPress/Getty Images

More than 30 million elderly people aged 60-69 in rural China make a living through physical work. To them, there’s no retirement, said a Chinese demographer.

An analysis of China’s recent national data shows there were about 150 million Chinese between 60 to 69, and 51.04 million of them were working, reported the Chinese media China Business Network (CBN).

Among the working elderly, the majority of them engaged in agriculture, forestry, animal husbandry, and fishery, accounting for 62.44 percent.

That’s more than 30 million people aged 60 to 69 years who are still engaged in manual labor work.

An Aging Labor Force

Dong Yuzheng, the director of the Guangdong Population Development Research Institute, said the rural elderly generally remain working to earn their living because they don’t have a stable income. To them, retirement is not an option, according to the CBN report.

According to a report from December 2022, data showed that Chinese peasants received a pension of 188 yuan ($27.3) per month—just 5.26 percent of the average monthly pension of 3,577 yuan ($519.41) given to urban retirees.

An elderly Chinese woman uses a cart to collect firewood for cooking near the Yangtze River city of Jiujiang, on March 7, 2007. Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images

Similar situations were also seen among some of the urban elderly, said the CBN report.

A Chinese online hiring platform, BOSS Zhipin.com, reported that active job seekers aged 55 and above increased by 27 percent in 2022.

According to research on the re-employment of elderly in 2022 by the Chinese recruitment platform 51job, nearly 70 percent of Chinese elderly have a strong desire to return to the workforce. Among them, 34.3 percent needed the income to meet higher consumption costs.

Numerous Chinese media reports claimed that governmental propaganda was encouraging retirees to return to the workforce to meet the ever changing needs of China’s aging society. However, Chinese media described the challenges encountered by elderly jobseekers.

A successful former executive of a foreign enterprise was reportedly frustrated for not being able to find one job that would offer him a monthly salary of 5,000 yuan ($724.66).

The media report said it’s clear that few businesses prefer to hire older candidates, and even fewer jobs match the qualifications of the candidates.

Regarding governmental policy, Ding Changfa, an associate professor at the School of Economics at Xiamen University, believed the type of work determines its accessibility for retirees. He told CBN that he suspected manual workers would find it harder to re-enter the workforce than those in other sectors.

Fang Xiao contributed to this report.