By IANS,
Shanghai : China’s Shanghai city is all set to witness a boom in its elderly population in the next five years as an estimated 4.3 million residents, or 30 percent of the registered population here, would have turned 60 by that time.
According to the annual report of the Shanghai Research Centre on Ageing, annually about 200,000 people will enter in their 60s from this year onwards to 2015. It is double the figure over the past five years.
A key problem, however, is that one-child parents will be forming the majority of seniors, and officials are concerned they will meet problems in their final years because of that, Shanghai Daily quoted the report as stating.
They were born in the first baby boom after 1949, and were the first parents to be subject to the one-child policy, says the Shanghai Civil Affairs Bureau.
Statistics indicate that from 2013, about 80 percent of senior citizens in the city will have only one child to attend to them.
“At present, seniors around the age of 80 have several children to look after them,” said Gao Julan, deputy director of the bureau. “But in the future, seniors will have only one child and his or her spouse. And if the child moves abroad or to other places in the country, seniors will be by themselves.”
The situation is the result of the baby boom after 1949, the year when the People’s Republic was established, the report states.
Another problem is that an increasing number of non-local seniors were coming to the city. There are no solid statistics on this.
Yu Xuming, deputy director of the Shanghai census office, says: “Many college students from other provinces stay in Shanghai after graduation, and the parents of a large number of them will also move to the city after they are retired.”
“So we should also consider their welfare and care in Shanghai,” he adds.
Till last year, the city had about 3.3 million residents over 60 years of age, or around 23 percent of the registered population, an increase of almost five percent on 2009.
In contrast, the number of senior citizens on the Chinese mainland stands about 12 percent.