Liu Tao, Sun Li
Fakultät für Soziologie, Universität Bielefeld, Universitätsstraße 25, 33615, Bielefeld, Germany,
Z Gerontol Geriatr. 2015 Jun;48(4):354-64. doi: 10.1007/s00391-014-0816-5. Epub 2014 Oct 17.
According to the National Bureau of Statistics of China, by 2010 the number of people aged 60 or over had reached 178 million in China or 13% of its population. With the largest elderly population in the world in absolute numbers, China faces a challenge of providing care for the elderly both in the present and the future. Unlike old age pensions and health protection for the elderly, in Chinese society elderly care had never been considered to be a social problem but rather the individual family's responsibility. After the turn of the millennium, as the repercussions of increasingly ageing demographics, the results of the One-Child Policy and drastic changes in traditional family structures gradually became more apparent, this issue of elderly care has increasingly become one of the most pressing concerns for the ageing society. As there is little existing research on this particular topic, this article aims to shed light on elderly care in China, focusing on the care of elderly needing assistance with activities of daily living, since this group of elderly are most in need of care, their numbers having risen to 33 million in 2010. This article argues it is urgent for China to switch from informal family-based elderly care to the state's formal long-term care, illustrates that a model of social insurance (e.g. as in Germany) is advocated by many Chinese scholars and points out the ways in which it is different from both the commercialized models (e.g. as in the USA) and state organized "Beveridge" models (e.g. as in Sweden).
根据中国国家统计局的数据，到2010年，中国60岁及以上的人口已达1.78亿，占其人口的13%。中国的老年人口绝对数量位居世界之首，在当前和未来都面临着为老年人提供照料的挑战。与老年人的养老金和健康保障不同，在中国社会，老年照料从未被视为一个社会问题，而是被认为是单个家庭的责任。进入新千年后，随着人口老龄化的影响日益加剧、独生子女政策的结果以及传统家庭结构的急剧变化逐渐变得更加明显，老年照料问题日益成为老龄化社会最紧迫的关切之一。由于目前关于这个特定主题的研究很少，本文旨在阐明中国的老年照料情况，重点关注需要日常生活活动协助的老年人的照料，因为这部分老年人最需要照料，到2010年其数量已增至3300万。本文认为，中国迫切需要从基于家庭的非正式老年照料转向国家的正式长期照料，说明许多中国学者倡导社会保险模式（如德国），并指出其与商业化模式（如美国）和国家组织的“贝弗里奇”模式（如瑞典）的不同之处。
