Can Western financial giants fix China's pension system?
Illustration by Sam Ward
From March to May 2002, tens of thousands of Chinese workers in three, northeastern “rust belt” cities protested layoffs, corruption and the non-payment of their pensions. It was China’s longest spell of public unrest since the 1989 Democracy Movement — and it attracted several Beijing-bashing millenarians to the pages of western newspapers.
China’s “one-child policy has resulted in a rapidly aging nation,” wrote American lawyer Gordon G. Chang in the International Herald Tribune. The country’s retirement funds, added Chang, would run dry in months. “Officials must do something now to avert a crisis in the national pension scheme.”
A one child policy propaganda poster from 1986. Credit: BG E13/415 (chineseposters.net, Landsberger collection)
There was, of course, money left in China in 2002, and fueled by the country's entry into the World Trade Organization, the economy was set to take off. But Chang was right about one thing. Since shortly after Bei
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