Wendy Liu has grown to dread the sound of her phone.
These days, most calls mean a parent of the 47-year-old vocational school teacher has been rushed to the hospital. Whether her mother with Alzheimer’s disease or her father with cancer, any emergency means a long, anxious drive from work to her home in Guangzhou – a stress-ridden trip she has made on countless nights.
Liu and her husband Deng Jie are members of China’s first generation of only children. Born in 1977 – only a year after the country instituted a one-child limit for most urban households – they not only have to raise two children, but also care for four ageing parents.
Last month’s announcement of higher retirement ages and persistent levels of youth unemployment are adding to worries they will need to work longer than their parents did, all the while providing more financial support to their adult children.
The dilemma of balancing care for the elderly and the young is becoming more commonplace as this cohort enters middle age. This “sandwich generation” is being overwhelmed with threefold pressures: a longer life expectancy for their elderly parents, extended dependency periods for their children, and hurdles in their own careers compounded by an economic downturn.
Raised without any siblings in the 1980s, China’s first batch of only children were once jokingly called “little emperors” for being the sole focus of their families.
But as they have grown into adulthood and started families of their own, these former household monarchs have found themselves on the wrong end of a top-heavy population pyramid.
According to the National Bureau of Statistics, between 1982 and 2023 the average life expectancy in China rose from 68 to 78.6 years, while the proportion of people aged 65 and older jumped from 4.9 to 15.4 per cent.
At the same time, the children of the “sandwich generation” are grappling with an unforgiving job market, with many dependent on family support even after graduation.
Per official figures, the jobless rate for the 16-24 age group excluding students rose to 18.8 per cent in August, up from 17.1 per cent in July.
The plight of Liu and Deng, seen in families around the country, is having downstream effects almost certain to dampen the younger population’s desire for marriage and children even further.
Deng, once a real estate project manager, lost a secure income amid a prolonged slump in China’s property market. Liu, meanwhile, is working hard to secure a professorship, leaving her little time to look after her parents.
Although Deng’s parents are still in good health relative to Liu’s, their advancing age has brought a greater need for daily care.
“I’m anxious, but the reality is that there will be more caregiving ahead, and I won’t be able to manage it all – let alone start a new career,” Deng said. “The only ‘relief’ may come if one of our parents passes away, but that is heartbreaking.”
With Deng’s income stagnating and their daughter unsure if she will find a job after graduation, things are looking bleak – and their two flats have also depreciated in value.
“Our wealth is starting to be insufficient to cover our current expenses, let alone future costs as we age,” Deng said. The couple’s daughter, currently in her third year of college, needs about 100,000 yuan (US$14,251) a year for tuition and living expenses. Education costs are also rising for their 12-year-old son.
According to a projection from Peking University’s department of sociology, the proportion of “dual-only-child families” where both parents are only children will peak at 34.2 per cent by 2030 in urban areas. ‘Single-only-child families’, where one parent is an only child, will account for nearly 50 per cent. Both are expected to present unprecedented challenges in elder and child care alike.
“My husband and I have a combined monthly income of just about 30,000 yuan this year – a third less than last year – and we can’t put anything into savings,” said Li Wei, a photographer and part of an only child couple born in the late 1980s.
“The outlook is grey,” she said. “We are in Shenzhen, my parents are hundreds of kilometres away in Shantou, and my husband’s parents are thousands of kilometres away in Yancheng. We have a mortgage of over 900,000 yuan to pay off and children to raise.”
To make matters worse, the simultaneous ageing of the population and decline in birth rate are having a suppressive effect on consumption, which may in turn harm China’s overall economy, said leading demographic economist Cai Fang at a conference in Beijing last month.
“Our parents are in their 60s,” Li said. “They might continue to work odd jobs to save some money for the next time they get sick.”
Yi Fuxian, a senior scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies Chinese demographics, has argued China’s one-child policy has necessitated an increase in the retirement age and depressed the youth population, resulting in insufficient domestic demand, lower employment and exports – all of which conspire to limit growth.
“When other countries reach China’s current tertiary enrolment rate, the service sector [typically] provides 70-80 per cent of jobs,” Yi said. “But due to underconsumption, China’s service sector provides only 45 per cent of jobs. This makes it difficult to employ college graduates who are primarily engaged in the service sector, resulting in high youth unemployment and declining marriage and fertility rates.”
China’s social security system has yet to account for the shortfall. According to data from 2022, less than one-third of Chinese workers pay into unemployment insurance, and only one-quarter of the urban unemployed actually receive benefits. More than half of all pensioners, primarily rural seniors, received a paltry average sum of 205 yuan a month.
And these are the early days of the demographic shift. One study by Peking University estimated that by 2030, China will have more than 77 million elderly people in need of long-term full-time care.
“My parents are retired workers, and although each has a pension of more than 4,000 yuan, it can’t cover their medical expenses,” said Xiao Hui, a 43-year-old media manager living in Shenzhen and another only child.
Her parents are both in their 70s. One suffers from Sjogren’s syndrome and polio, and the other has Parkinson’s disease – conditions which require costly medications and frequent hospitalisation to treat.
“After insurance reimbursements, I have to pay at least 90,000 yuan a year for their medicine bills, let alone care fees,” Xiao said.
“Probably the only way out is to sell the house to meet the expenses of my parents and children. But when my husband and I grow old, odds are our children will repeat what we are going through now. That thought breaks my heart.”
Independent demographer Huang Wenzheng said the present quandaries of the only child generation could snowball, as other age groups witness their hardships and seek to avoid their fate at all costs.
“The government must realise that future economic issues stem from an excessively shrinking population,” Huang said. “There has never been a case like China’s where a country’s annual newborn population dropped by half in just seven or eight years, and the root of the problem can be traced to the one-child policy.”
One group of retirees seems to have avoided such a fate – those formerly employed by China’s vast bureaucracy.
Many leaving the urban state apparatus depart with higher pensions and levels of healthcare reimbursement than their rural and private-sector peers, providing the elderly in this contingent with a level of stability that allows their children to breathe easier. In some cases, even “one-child couples” can ask parents and grandparents to assist with major purchases, a phenomenon referred to as having “six wallets”.
But in the medium term, the bigger picture is far from certain. The International Monetary Fund has projected China’s gross domestic product growth will drop to about 3.3 per cent by 2029, a significant decrease compared to last year’s 5.2 per cent.
“No one can solve [this group’s] suffering without effective incentives and changing society’s pessimistic expectations for a continued population shrinkage,” he said. “Only then will companies have the confidence to invest and young people have job opportunities and stable incomes; otherwise, the social and economic pressures on young people in the future will worsen.”
More from South China Morning Post:
- China encourages elderly to volunteer as workforce shrinks and population ages
- China raises retirement age by up to 5 years amid growing pressure from ageing population
- Retirement delay vs immigration: US academic stirs debate on China’s population crisis
- China vows to make key social security fund ‘bigger, stronger’ amid ageing population
- China must focus on human development over infrastructure: population expert
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