Growing old with dignity
China struggles to care for elderly
By Miao Hong

Gong Shihai, a 73-year-old peasant, had never dreamed that he was married for the first time in his life at a township senior citizens home, 40 kilometers southeast of Wuhan,capital of central China’s Hubei Province.
He had led a lonely and childless life in the small village of Zhazhou, within the reach of Donggou Town of Ezhou City, where he farmed 1.2-mu land and each month received a fixed amount of 70 yuan ( 9.2 U.S. dollars) from the government. Sometimes, Gong’s nephews would offer him rice and cooking oil. They wanted to take care of him, but like other able-bodied laborers in rural areas,they left to find jobs in large cities. Gong had to manage everything by himself. In the village, Gong was one of the ten single aged people who benefited from the government’s “five guarantees” system. These childless and infirm elderly, known as rural “wubao laoren” in Chinese, are guaranteed food, clothing, medical care and burial expenses by the village.
Gong could earn his own living with financial support of the village and the help of relatives and neighbors, but sometimes he felt helpless and easily descended into a state of anxiety, especially when he fell sick. The elderly of the village tried to persuade the village cadres to help hire a nurse for them, but didn’t succeed. The cadres had other advice in return. In May 2005, Gong turned over his farmland to the village and moved into his “new home” at the Donggou Welfare House. Soon after he moved to enjoy the “centralized care” funded by the government, his benefit was raised to 100 yuan (13.2 U.S. dollars) per month and was again raised to 150 yuan (19.8 U.S. dollars) per month this July. Gong felt cozy in the new habitat. He indulged in a “sunset romance” with a childless widow his own age. He fell in love with Huang Lanxiang in November 2005. They married on January 8, 2006. “I took a fancy to her,” Gong admits, with a hint of coyness. “She is good in character and personality. We get along so very well. ”
Four other elderly couples have married in the welfare house. Their pairings enable them to take better care of each other while lightening the burden on the nursing staff. Gong likes playing card games or chess in his spare time. “It’s ten thousand times better than staying at home,” Gong says, and boasts he could “live to be a hundred, no problem”. The welfare house, built in 1997, is now fully occupied by 85 old people, with the oldest at 95. The number of male residents doubles that of the female. The wubao laoren aged over 60 have preference in admission. “It all depends on whether they want to move in,” says Fu Yuancheng, 61, the principal of the welfare house ever since 1997. He used to be a village head as well as a township factory director. “We took in two disabled under 60 because they could not work.” Initially, the house only had 880 square meters of bungalows with 43 beds. As a result of the three-year “Mascot Project” launched in Hubei Province in 2003, an expansion with six new cottages of 660 square meters with 42 beds was accomplished in 2005. With his eight staff and the residents, Fu has tried to develop mixed farming, making this welfare house self-sufficient in grain, vegetables, fruit, fish and pork.
According to Wei Guoxiang, an official from the Civil Affairs Department of Hubei Province, the fending funds for rural beneficiaries of the “five guarantees” system was transferred from the central government to local governments after rural taxation reforms and the source of which became more stabilized. It was against this backdrop that the provincial government launched its three-year “Mascot Project”, which ended in 2005, designed to benefit more rural elderly in extreme financial difficulties. As a result, more than 700 welfare houses were rebuilt and expanded, with a total of 670 million yuan (88.4 million U.S.dollars) invested in the project. Last year and this year, the provincial government successively allocated 50 million yuan (6.6 million U.S. dollars) to improve nursing conditions in rural welfare houses. The provincial government allocated six million yuan (791,985 U.S. dollars) to purchase 400 TV sets, 800 washing machines, more than 1,400 freezers and more than 200 solar water heaters as well as more than 100 sets of exercise equipment.

—China Features