BBC News - China: Growing old before it can grow rich?
China is already getting "Japan old" well before it could get out of the 3rd world country status, and get forever stuck in the 3rd world status.
India doesn't face this problem thanks to high birthrate, and this is why all the economists project that India will overtake China soon to become the biggest economy on earth.
China: Growing old before it can grow rich?
By Mukul Devichand
BBC News
Will China's rapidly ageing population threaten its economic prosperity?
China's economic miracle has been accompanied by astonishingly rapid population ageing. Could growing old too fast end China's irresistible march out of poverty?
Where Shanghai leads, China follows. The city is ultra-modern - but also one of the fastest-ageing places on Earth.
The glitz of Shanghai's Bund, an avenue of skyscrapers, is close-by. But in the teeming lanes behind the skyscrapers, there are hundreds of fading blocks crammed with the elderly and poor.
The average age goes up as countries develop, because people live longer and have fewer children. But in China, the one-child policy has triggered a rapid decline in the birth rate.
"The speed of ageing in China is unique," says Professor Peng Xizhe, a leading demographer at Fudan University.
China has taken just 20 years to reach an age profile that took Britain or France 60 or 70 years, he says.
New figures show that one in four permanent Shanghai residents is now retired.
The rest of China is catching up - by the year 2050, a third of Chinese people, 450 million, will be aged over 60.
China is already getting "Japan old" well before it could get out of the 3rd world country status, and get forever stuck in the 3rd world status.
India doesn't face this problem thanks to high birthrate, and this is why all the economists project that India will overtake China soon to become the biggest economy on earth.