Caregivers get a welcome break

Aging on the rise

But as the elderly population has expanded in society, the traditional concept of taking care of parents has become much harder to fulfill.

According to a report released by the China Development Research Foundation recently, the country's elderly population is expected to top 300 million by 2035. The population is not likely to peak and start declining until around 2030, when the total population is projected to be as high as 1.44 billion. The population will then drop to around 1.38 billion by 2050.

Zheng Bingwen, director of the Center for International Social Security Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said in an online news conference on June 11 that the demographic structure in China had changed during the 13th Five-Year Plan period (2016-20). For one thing, the number of births has dropped compared with the previous five years

The trend characterized by an aging population combined with fewer newborns has become more obvious in recent years, although the total population in China is still growing, Zheng said. That's largely due to longer life spans.

"The ratio of people caring for the elderly has been raised in the past decade, up 10 percent from a decade earlier, which means the younger generation now bear so much greater financial burden than before," he said.

The discrepancy is more prominent in big cities, such as Beijing. Some middle-aged people in the capital wanted to have more free time after work; instead, they found themselves spending more time taking care of their elderly parents.

For families with seniors who are disabled or who have Alzheimer's, long-term care is even more challenging. According to the National Health Commission as of the end of 2018, the number of elderly people over 60 years old had reached 249 million. Of those, more than 180 million had chronic diseases and nearly 40 million were disabled or partially disabled.