The timing was impeccable: Also on Monday, China’s long awaited revision to its “Law to Protect the Elderly” was enacted, along with a controversial new provision requiring adult children to visit their parents “often.” The court wasted no time in citing the law as the basis for its decision.
Granny Chu’s is a tale worthy of a guilt-ridden Woody Allen comedy, except that the verdict — and the law that enabled it – – are designed to address a serious problem in contemporary China: How to financially and “spiritually” (in the words of the new legislation) support an aging population. Of course, major problems meeting the pension and health-care needs of a rapidly aging population are certainly not unique to China.
But the scale of the looming problem in China makes the pension shortfalls in the U.S. and Europe Union seem trivial. In 2012, Zhu Yong, deputy director of the Chinese government’s National Committee on Aging, told a Beijing conference on pension reform that in 2013 the number of Chinese over age 60 would exceed 200 million; it would peak in 2050 at 483 million.