Shanghai’s elderly population keeps rising

Shanghai continued to age last year.

The city's population of residents over the age of 60 jumped 5.6 percent year-on-year to 3.67 million in 2012, accounting for 25.7 percent of its total population, according to figures the local government released at a press conference Thursday.

The figures show that much of the city's senior citizen population remains concentrated downtown, though the majority of elderly care facility beds are located in the outer districts.

Jing'an district had the largest proportion of elderly residents of any district in Shanghai in 2012. Residents over the age of 60 made up 29.2 percent of the district's population, according to figures from the Shanghai Municipal Civil Affairs Bureau, the Shanghai Municipal Statistics Bureau and the Shanghai Municipal Committee on Aging. The figures only accounted for residents with local household registration.

Jing'an was followed by Chongming county and Hongkou district, whose over-60 demographics respectively accounted for 28.5 percent and 28 percent of their total populations, the figures showed.

To deal with the growing aging population, the local government increased the number of beds at elderly care facilities citywide by 3.3 percent to 105,215 in 2012.

Still, the majority of those beds are located in the city's outskirts. The 2010 annual report on social welfare showed that 67 percent of the beds in elderly care facilities were in Pudong New Area and the city's outer districts.

In Jing'an, there were only 1.07 beds available for every 100 senior citizens, the lowest ratio of any district in Shanghai, according to the report. In Hongkou district, there were 1.9 beds for every 100 seniors. In contrast, Jiading district had four beds available for every 100 seniors.

"It has been a problem for quite some time that the areas where more seniors live lack beds in retirement homes and other public facilities," said Ren Yuan, a professor at the Institute of Population Research at Fudan University.

Senior people are reluctant to move to retirement homes and nursing homes in the outer districts because they aren't as well-equipped as those downtown, Ren told the Global Times. In addition, most of the city's hospitals and good doctors are in the downtown districts, which have made the retirement homes there more popular.