69% of Chinese oppose retirement age rise
Print Edition
Nearly 69 percent of Chinese opposed a proposal to raise the retirement age as they worried that the plan would result in a heavy workload and insufficient labor protection, according to a survey released yesterday.
China has been considering delaying retirement age since 2008 to cope with its shrinking workforce and aging society, and the proposal was widely seen as a way to ease the growing burden on the national pension system.
China is now facing a pension crisis based on the pension replacement rate, or percentage of a worker’s pre-retirement income that the pension replaces.
The World Bank suggested the rate should be at least 70 percent if people wanted to maintain the pre-retirement living standard. The International Labor Organization set it at 55 percent.
But the rate has been declining annually in recent years and was 50.3 percent in China in 2011, People’s Daily reported.
Of the 1,062 people surveyed nationwide recently by the website of People’ Daily, 68.6 percent said No to the proposal, with employees at foreign-funded companies voicing the fiercest opposition. More than half of the people working for government institutions also objected.
Most of the interviewees think the scheme don’t suit China.
‘‘Why most of us are opposed to the proposal is mainly because in China, we work under more stress over longer period and we don’t have better rules to protect workers’ rights,’’ said Tang Jun, secretary-general of the social policy research center of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
Meanwhile, 59 percent were in favor of abolishing the much-criticized dual pension mechanism, in which civil servants and employees at government-affiliated institutions enjoy pensions worth several times those in other enterprises.
Due to pay difference, 78.9 percent of farmers and 56 percent of urban residents argued their pension funds couldn’t cover the needs of life.
Meanwhile, 73.5 percent supported flexible retirement that would help workers plan for early or late retirement. But 9.3 percent strongly opposed such a policy.
The top three measures the respondents said should be implemented in reforming the pension system were adopting a flexible retirement mechanism instead of a one-size-fits-all policy, setting up a multi-pronged system and narrowing the pension gap that different groups of employees should receive.
The survey was carried out in 11 cities, including Shanghai.
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