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Old Age Security: A Case from Rural Suzhou
Abstract
During the course of urbanization and industrialization, a growing number of farmers have become landless as local governments have bought out their land for non-agricultural uses. Even in the localities where the industrialization process absorbs a vast majority of rural labor, the questions of how to compensate for the economic shock on the rural landless and how to alleviate and eliminate mental suffering as a result of losing land have always been a challenge to government capacity in social stabilization and a yardstick to measure social justice in local communities. In the administration areas of Suzhou City in Jiangsu Province, governments at all levels have successfully coped with this challenge. By means of “swapping land for old-age support” and income redistribution, Suzhou municipality has not only met the demand on land for urbanization and industrialization while maintaining social stability, but also laid a foundation for establishing an integrated pension system for both urban and rural residents. Such a system has changed the tradition of farmers' households relying on land to deal with economic risk and of the aged depending on their sons for livelihood support in rural society.
Edited by Xinyu Fan
失地老人作为农村城镇化过程中因征地拆迁而产生的一个特殊群体，面临养老的现实问
题。本文对苏州“农转居”社区的研究发现，土地征用对失地老人的生活和养老方式产生了重要影响。失地老人以“土地换保障”方式获得了基本的养老与医疗保障。失地老人养老保障标准（养老金）在逐年提高，同时市场、社区、家庭等诸多主体都为失地老人的养老支持发挥了作用。但是，支持主体的多元化及投入的增加并没有带来养老服务效能的提高，反而出现了福利低位锁定、传统支持衰减、新增资源耗损等“内卷化”问题。具体表现为：失地老人的养老金与医疗保险待遇偏低，集体经济供给能力有限，家庭与社区支持不足，机构养老接受度低等问题。因此，为解决养老内卷化问题，需要提升失地农民的社会保障待遇，充分发挥传统养老机制的优势，发展社区嵌入式养老机构，缩小征地范围，规避失地风险。
As a special group in the process of rural urbanization and land acquisition, the old people who lost their land are facing the practical problems regarding eldercare service provision. This article, based on an analysis of a “rural to residential” community in Suzhou Municipality, Jiangsu Province, finds that land acquisition has generated a strong impact on the life and pension style of the landless elderly. The old people who lost their land are provided with a basic pension and medical coverage under the scheme of “land for security”. The local government has continuously increased their pension while at the same time designed policies to enable them to receive support from the market (wage jobs), community, family and other sources. However, the proliferation of eldercare support institutions and the investment increase have not substantially improved the efficiency of eldercare services. Instead, involution problems emerged, including insufficient pension, diminishing traditional support and inefficient use of public resources. Therefore, in order to solve the problems of “eldercare involution”, it is necessary to improve the land-for-security system, give full play to the advantages of traditional sources of eldercare support, develop community-based support institutions, reduce the scope of land acquisition, and increase the standards of compensation for loss of land.
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