The Chinese Communist Party has initiated a long-term care insurance system that includes retirees in a continuous payment system, implementing a “pay while receiving” policy. The new regulations require direct deduction of long-term care insurance fees from retirees’ pensions, breaking the tradition of ceasing payments upon retirement. This move has sparked backlash among the public.
The General Office of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party and the General Office of the State Council issued the “Opinions on Accelerating the Establishment of a Long-Term Care Insurance System,” proposing the acceleration of establishing such a system. According to the document, retirees are required to pay a separate fee, estimated at around 0.15%, linked to the level of their pensions, deducted directly from individual accounts or pension funds.
In response to the new regulations, Beijing retiree Zhang Chongyang told a reporter, “Our previous understanding was to pay during work and receive benefits after retirement. Now, retirees are required to continue paying even after retirement, which is a rule change. These people (the CCP) have squandered money and are now targeting the elderly; these people are really despicable.”
Regarding the mandatory payment requirement for retirees, official Chinese media has justified it by stating that since over 90% of disabled individuals are elderly, requiring the elderly to pay reflects a “balance of rights and obligations.” This explanation has quickly ignited public outrage.
One internet user commented, “I’m retired, do I have to pay? I don’t need this kind of insurance at all!” This sentiment represents widespread opposition among the public. Many feel that this “forced enrollment” deprives them of basic choice and essentially transforms social security from a welfare benefit to a form of survival tax.
Zhang Chongyang sharply exposes the underlying injustice of the system. He points out that officials at the bureau level and above enjoy high-end medical treatment that ordinary people can hardly access, with no additional costs: “When a bureau-level government official falls ill, they stay in a VIP ward, use imported medicine, all paid for by the government. What do ordinary people get? They only get endless mandatory payments.” This medical dual-track system where “privileged officials enjoy benefits while the common people fill the gap,” makes the so-called “risk sharing” particularly ironic.
According to the National Bureau of Statistics of China’s “Statistical Communique on National Economic and Social Development in 2025,” by the end of 2025, the population aged 60 and above in China had surged to 323 million, accounting for 23.0% of the total population. This sharp aging demographic directly challenges the last line of defense of the pension system, forcing officials to turn to a “second harvest” from the retired population.
An academic who has long been concerned about the social security system, Mr. Ruan, analyzed that the original intention of long-term care insurance was not simply to provide “additional welfare” but rather a precise fund transfer: “This is forcibly separating nursing expenses that originally belonged to the medical insurance system, establishing a new ‘fund pool’ independently. In other words, the state no longer wants to bear this huge cost alone, shifting the source from government finance directly to the pockets of the people.”
The new regulations stipulate that long-term care insurance only covers “severe disabilities” as a payment threshold, and the form of protection is limited to nursing services, not cash compensation. This means that the vast majority of retirees will face the dilemma of “lifetime payment without receiving a penny” in their remaining years.
A senior human resources professional in Shanghai, Ms. Cao, told reporters, “This is not the insurance people understand. Most are paying long-term for a very low probability of ‘disability service’. When they really need emergency funds, all they get is a few nursing services. How is this any different from a disguised ‘elderly tax’?”
With the introduction of the new regulations, public opinion quickly exploded. Netizens denounced this “matryoshka-style” exploitation logic, with comments like, “Working hard for social security in your youth, only to have money forcibly deducted from your pension when you are old. Isn’t this just squeezing the elderly to the last drop of blood?” This absurd arrangement of “receiving money on one hand and paying out on the other” has shattered the once clear retirement contract.
Academic circles in mainland China are equally uneasy about the regulations. Some scholars have candidly expressed to reporters that the most dangerous signal of this system is that retirees are reintegrated into the “payment cycle”: “The social security’s bottom line was the separation of payment and benefits, where retirement marked the end; now the two are beginning to overlap, indicating that the CCP has completely broken the societal contract’s bottom line.”
By around 2028, as this system is forcibly implemented nationwide, hundreds of millions of retired individuals in China will officially enter an era of “simultaneous receiving and paying.” The public is concerned that this new regulation may push countless elderly people’s later years into even greater uncertainty.