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Ageing society
This Week in AsiaSociety

A glimpse of Hong Kong’s lonely future in South Korea’s ageing society

  • Longer lives, fewer marriages and more divorces suggest seniors living alone will be a fixture of Asian societies for the foreseeable future
  • South Korea, where seniors can die without anyone noticing for days, offers a bleak insight into what’s in store

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South Korean Cho Hye-do, 86, meets her North Korean elder sister Cho Sun-do, 89, at an inter-Korean family reunion in 2018. South Korea’s population is ageing rapidly. Photo: EPA-EFE
David D. Lee

Ko Myung-hee starts the engine of her SUV with bags full of fresh vegetables picked from her own garden and two ice-cold bottles of sikhye – a sweet rice drink. It’s 9am and the 52-year-old senior care administrator in South Korea’s northernmost province of Paju sets out to visit some of the area’s dokgeo-noin – senior citizens living alone. And she doesn’t like to arrive empty-handed.

There are more than 740,000 South Korean seniors living alone and a study conducted by the welfare ministry shows this population expands by 50,000 each year. In Paju there are about 14,000 seniors living alone but the Paju Senior Community Centre where Ko works must prioritise 1,100 most in need.

“For these seniors spending all their time alone in their house, all they want is to see or even just hear the voices of their children once in a while,” Ko says. “This is their hope and their dream.”

South Korea officially became an “aged society” in 2017 when people older than 65 came to account for more than 14 per cent of the population. In the same year, the number of people aged 15-64 fell by 116,000 – the first such decrease in the working-age population. In 2018, births hit an all-time low of 357,771.
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South Korea is not alone in confronting the challenges of an ageing population – indeed, it offers a glimpse into problems faced by many of its Asian neighbours. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), more than 30 per cent of the populations in China, Japan and South Korea will be 65 or older by 2060. In Hong Kong, the situation may be even more severe, with the city’s government projecting the number of people aged 65 or over will reach 2.58 million by 2064, around 35.9 per cent of the population.
In each of these societies, longer lifespans are coinciding with falling marriage rates and growing divorce rates, suggesting seniors living alone will be a fixture in these places for the foreseeable future.
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For her part, Ko used to live with her two college-aged sons but two years ago moved in with her 92-year-old mother.

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