In China’s traditional agrarian culture, those aging relatives would live with, and be supported by, their children. But the country’s modernizing economy means children are moving far from their parents to work. Moreover, thanks in large part to population-control policies, Zhu estimates that China’s workforce will shrink to 713 million by 2050, down 24.2 percent from 2011, leaving fewer children to support aging parents. This demographic crunch is creating something relatively new in China: empty-nesters.
In other words, the number of households containing parents whose adult children have moved out is growing. According to data gathered by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, in 2011empty nests accounted for 49.7 percent of urban households and 38.7 percent of rural households. This number will increase as China’s population ages, reaching more than 54 percent of all elderly households in 2050, says Zhu Yong.
China is woefully under-prepared for this shift. In February, the independent Economic Observer newspaper reported, in an article quoting Yan Qingchun, deputy director of China’s National Committee on Aging, that there are only 300,000 caregivers for the elderly in China, and less than 100,000 have“obtained professional qualifications;” of China’s 30,000 rural retirement homes, only 11,000 are “registered and legal.”