China faces the inevitable, raising its low retirement age

livemint.com:

Squeezed by an economic downturn and a rapidly aging population, China took a step toward raising its unusually low benchmarks for when people should retire. China has one of the lowest retirement ages among major economies, letting women retire as early as 50 and men at 60—policies unchanged since the 1950s. Beijing has long said it wants citizens to work longer, but has repeatedly put off any policy changes for fear of social pushback.

The urgency has grown as the country confronts a decline in births and a shrinking workforce. The National People’s Congress, China’s top legislative body, said Tuesday that it is reviewing a draft law to “gradually delay mandatory retirement ages." But even as it announced the move, Beijing didn’t unveil any details. Intense state-media coverage about the step indicated the government is testing the waters for how it will be received as unemployment is high among young people and local governments are short of funds for public services, including pension payments.

The government emphasized that the implementation will be gradual. “Gradual implementation of the policy means that the scale of the labor force released to society in the short term will not be too large, and the overall impact on the job market will be limited," the official Xinhua News Agency cited Yuan Xin, deputy head of the China Population Association, as saying. Many young Chinese are seeing a higher retirement age as inevitable.

Some state-owned companies have held internal briefings about the plan in recent years. Still, a hashtag about the plan gained heated discussions on Chinese social media. A few users said their posts commenting about the announcement have been scrubbed from Weibo, a Chinese microblogging