The business of ageing

People in the mainland increasingly eat, shop and play in ways their Western counterparts would instantly recognise. They're ageing like them too, living longer lives that are often limited by debilitating illnesses.

As the almost 200 million population of over-60s more than doubles in the next 40 years, the mainland faces a deluge of infirm elderly who can't live alone. Nor can they rely on Confucian tradition of children caring for their parents: the country's one-child policy has left fewer offspring to share the load, while more mainlanders are moving away from home to study or work.

While Beijing spent 1.1 trillion yuan (HK$1.4 trillion) over the past four years to cut the cost of drugs and provide basic medical coverage for more than 90 per cent of its 1.3 billion people, services for the elderly have fallen behind. To plug the gap, Premier Li Keqiang said on August 16 the government would cut red tape and costs to spur foreign investment into the type of privately funded care that was common in the West.

"They're going to be struggling with an enormous burden in terms of caring for their elderly," said Benjamin Shobert, managing director of Rubicon Strategy Group in Seattle, which advises companies on how to enter Asian health care markets. "They don't really have two bites of the apple. Purely from a time-frame point of view, the next 10 years are critical."

More than two decades of record economic growth turned the Chinese into the world's top consumers of cars and smartphones. At the same time, the average person can expect to live more than six years longer than in 1990, World Health Organisation data shows. They can also look forward to 16 years of life after retirement, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Those gains came at a cost. Uneven growth lured hundreds of millions of people from rural areas into cities, separating families and removing a key source of support for the elderly.

The social upheaval eroding China's multi-generational family structure is accompanied by changes in health, a study published in June's edition of The Lancet shows.