From ditch digging to herding donkeys, no rest for China’s rural seniors

Ren Dezhi peers into his woodpile, looking for the Siberian weasel that a neighbor just spotted slinking toward his henhouse. 

Finding no trace of it, he gathers corn to feed his drove of donkeys – working stock for his small, 2-acre farm – and prepares to herd them into the rugged hills of northern Shaanxi province.

Mr. Ren’s tanned face bears the telltale wrinkles of a life spent farming on the harsh, windswept loess plateau. If he’d grown up in one of China’s big cities, he would be retired by now, enjoying a worker’s pension. Instead, he must eke out a living, raising crops of potatoes, beans, and corn on his scattered, terraced fields.

“Aiyah, this land can’t sustain us reliably,” Mr. Ren, in his late 60s, says with a sigh one recent morning. “If the weather is good, we can get a harvest. If there’s drought, we have nothing. We depend on heaven to eat.”

Across China’s countryside, tens of millions of older villagers like Mr. Ren are working hard well into their golden years – out of pride as well as, increasingly, because they must. As China rapidly ages, rural areas are graying faster: Nearly a quarter of rural people are over age 60. But traditional family support is waning and social security is meager. So in Shaanxi and elsewhere, resilient seniors are picking up odd jobs, toiling in fields, and trying new crops and greenhouse farming to make ends meet.

“Elderly will have to rely on themselves until they no longer can,” says Yong Cai, a professor of sociology and expert on China’s birth policies and population aging at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “It’s an arrangement of necessity.”

Empty wallets and empty nests

Mr. Ren and his wife, Lin Yiping, make less than $1,400 a year selling corn they grow as well as small amounts of wild medicinal herbs that they pick, dry, and peddle for about 7 cents a pound. They also receive a public pension of about $17 each a month – helpful for pocket money but little else. “This money won’t solve any problems for us,” Mr. Ren says of the pension. “We still have to take care of ourselves.”

Although China’s living standards have improved vastly in recent decades, with extreme poverty greatly alleviated, many villagers remain impoverished. “China’s journey in poverty reduction did not end with the eradication of absolute poverty in 2020,” states a World Bank report published last year. “With the adoption of a concept of poverty better suited to a moderately prosperous society, some 200 million people would still require support to realize improved living standards.”

As a group, rural workers are worse off than their urban peers. “People living in rural areas receive very little pension support and live well below the poverty line,” writes Yaohui Zhao, an economics professor at the National School of Development at Peking University, in a November 2022 Lancet commission report on healthy aging in China. In 2021, per capita income of rural residents was less than 40% that of city dwellers. 

Villages such as Mr. Ren’s are home mainly to empty nesters, their offspring having moved to cities in search of jobs, joining a wave of migrants now totaling 384 million. Wages are higher in cities due to China’s rural-urban divide, enforced by its long-rigid hukou population registration system. With many houses vacant and children’s voices rare, the hamlets are tranquil but, at times, forlorn for seniors.

“The fragmentation of the family is obviously a challenge” impacting care for China’s older villagers, says Stuart Gietel-Basten, professor of social science at Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi and former director of the Center for Aging Science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. “Loneliness ... is a big issue, and the extent to which this is going to become a bigger issue in the future is ... a major concern.”

China’s deep-rooted Confucian values stress filial piety, obligating children, and sons in particular, to care for their aged parents. Offspring often do send funds home, but as they are fewer and more distant, experts say the ancient tradition of family support is breaking down, leaving rural seniors bereft.

Mr. Ren and his wife have two grown children living in a nearby town, but they too are strapped for resources. Their son digs oil wells – work that Ms. Lin says is unpredictable and dangerous. “Their lives are hard,” she explains, as she sweeps the farmhouse floor with a homemade straw broom. “They’ve barely solved the problem of having enough to eat and wear.”

So, like many older rural Chinese, the couple have resolved to fend for themselves to avoid burdening the younger generation. Cheerful and spry, Mr. Ren swings open the wooden gate of the donkey shelter. “Hey!” he calls to the beasts, rapping a wooden railing with a stick. He follows the herd down a dirt path, an umbrella tucked under his arm, and heads once again into the hills.

Pension problems

With a swift step on her shovel and tug of her hand, Gao Chunlian uproots a bunch of green onions, shakes off the dirt, and passes it to her husband to bag. Whether tending their vegetable garden or signing on with road crews, Ms. Gao shoulders the heavier work these days, with her husband being too feeble to farm.

“As old as I am, I still have to work,” says the sexagenarian, sweeping back a loose strand of hair. “I even climb up the trees to pick apples!” 

The pay isn’t great, she says – only about $15 a day. Still, she rarely turns down a chance to earn money, even if it means going from village to village. 

“Wherever there is work, I will go there,” she says in her farmhouse in rural Shaanxi.

Down the road, three older farmers from Ms. Gao’s village toil with shovels, digging a ditch. A much younger boss sits in his car, supervising. “I get paid 120 yuan [$17] a day,” says Liu Wenfu, a farmer in his late 60s, sweating and catching his breath. 

Like Ms. Gao and Mr. Liu, more Chinese will have to work later in life to make ends meet in coming decades. 

“For most farmers, there is no such thing as ‘retirement,’” Niu Fengrui, former director of the Institute of Urban Development and Environment of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told China Business News in March.

China already has the biggest elderly population in the world. By 2050, an estimated 395 million Chinese will be 65 years old and above, making China the oldest of the 20 most populous countries. Meanwhile, the country’s birthrate is falling, a trend exacerbated by the “one-child” policy in place from 1980 to 2016, meaning there will be fewer working-age people to support these hundreds of millions of seniors. 

This population shift, coupled with rising local government debt and a slowing economy, is placing pressure on China’s pension system. China’s current average rural pension of about $25 a month “barely covers basic living expenses for seniors in rural areas,” Yixin Yao, a senior research fellow at the Asian Development Bank Institute, wrote in May in the state-run China Daily. This compares with an average monthly pension of $500 for urban workers. But Dr. Yao calls the current pension system, which by some estimates will run out of money this year, “unsustainable.”

Indeed, Beijing now plans to push all China’s older citizens to work longer. Earlier this year, state-run media reported the government plans to gradually raise the retirement age for urban workers to 65 – up from the current 60 for men, and 55 or 50 for women. “It will not be popular with anyone, but they realize at the macro level it’s necessary,” says Professor Yong.

The upshot is that raising rural pensions is “impossible” in China today, says Alfred Wu, associate professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore and an expert in central-local fiscal relations. The government doesn’t “have much money for rural areas,” he adds. “This is resource competition.”

Farmers show resilience

Practical and down-to-earth, senior farmers in the villages of northern Shaanxi are striving to make a living on their own for as long as they can, even if it means backbreaking work and sacrifice in what would be their golden years. 

Despite limited schooling, they are launching into new types of greenhouse farming, planting cash crops of apples and apricots, and other enterprises – trying to get ahead.

Farmer Li Shigui, who’s nearing his 70s, lives in a tiny brick hut perched on a steep terrace beside his greenhouse, which he rents from the government.

Inside the mud-walled enclosure, rows of beans are climbing string trellises, and watermelons are ripening in nets suspended from the plastic dome ceiling. Mr. Li also grows tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and other crops year-round.

“We have irrigation here,” he says, pointing to the pipe supplying pumped water to his crops. After decades spent relying on rainfall for harvests, Mr. Li has boosted his income to around $5,000 a year.

As with the other greenhouse farmers encamped in spartan, one-room dwellings scattered across the slope, Mr. Li’s venture has managed to gain him a bit more security, at least for now.

And as he heads back to his hut for the evening, he says with a tinge of pride, “I don’t get any money from the government.”