Event

Raising legal retirement ages, also known as retirement age reform, is politically contentious worldwide, but it should be more easily pursued in non-democratic regimes that can effectively deter opponents from mobilizing to oppose retirement age increases. In China, where retirement age reform has been considered since the early 2000s, the reluctance to raise retirement ages poses something of a puzzle. China’s retirement ages, introduced in the 1950s, remained unchanged until 2024, when very incremental changes were introduced that will not be fully effective until 2035. This talk reviews policy documents and public messaging to analyze the constraints on and opposition to meaningful retirement age reform. The research engages with the concept of “institutional drift,” or cases of institutions whose original economic or demographic context changes dramatically, but original rules remain in place as new actors mobilize to retain the old rules. This research is part of a larger project on the politics of population aging under China’s state capitalist political economy.