etirement
China’s Florida
People used to retire where they lived and worked. That is beginning to change
May 26th 2016 | SANYA
THE cheongsam modelling contest starts at 7pm; at 8pm it is group dances in the style of ethnic Uighurs from China’s far west, and of fan-waving north-easterners from provinces adjoining Russia and North Korea. Participants and spectators alike are pensioners: retired miners, teachers and industrial workers. They sit in the evening cool, gossiping and applauding. A man in a Hawaiian shirt keeps the beat with castanets. Fei Liyue, a former construction manager, says that he and his relatives come every evening. He is 3,200km (2,000 miles) from his home in the bleak oil city of Daqing.
Almost everyone is, like Mr Fei, from the rust belt of the north-east, a region that is gripped in winter by an Arctic chill. But the scene here is by the beach in the subtropical city of Sanya in Hainan, an island province as far south from their native region as it is possible to go without leaving the country (see map). Palm fronds and bougainvillea rustle in the breeze. Bikini-clad tourists dash by. The crowds of elderly visitors (some are pictured) are something new in Sanya. They may herald a profound social change.
Chinese people used to live, work, retire and die where they were born. The country’s filial traditions reflect this: children are supposed to look after their parents. The bureaucracy enforces it: everyone has a hukou (household registration) which provides subsidised health and education, almost always in a person’s place of birth.
Thanks to the migration of workers, however, 260m people, about one-fifth of the population, now live somewhere other than their birthplace. In the past five years, the pattern of retirement has also begun to change. Increasing numbers spend some or all of their pensionable years away from where they used to work. Neither filial tradition nor the hukou system have proved strong enough to prevent this.
In the 1950s and 1960s Americans flocked from cold industrial cities, such as New York and Chicago, to subtropical Florida. Now Chinese people are moving from the industrial heartland of Heilongjiang, Jilin and Liaoning (the three north-eastern provinces) to Hainan. And just as movement to America’s sunbelt helped transform a backward region, so the same thing could happen in China.
Fifty years ago Sanya was a small fishing village. Ye Yaer, who was born there in 1961, survived on discarded ends of sugar cane and did not get a pair of shoes until he was 12. Every day his mother walked 25km to the nearest market town, carrying those of her children too young to walk as well as 20 kilos of fish to sell. Now Mr Ye is a successful fish-dealer whose business extends across southern China; Sanya is full of five-star resorts. And as happened in Florida, a retirement business is being built on the back of Hainan’s tourism.
According to Sanya’s government, 400,000-500,000 pensioners head to the city each year, perhaps half of them from the north-east. That compares with the city’s total population (those resident for six months or longer) of 749,000. The incomers are not the new rich. Huang Cheng of Sanya University says one-third of the sun-seeking pensioners have a monthly income of 2,000-3,000 yuan ($305-460), about the average for a working person. A quarter receive only 1,000-2,000 yuan a month. Most come for six months and return to the north-east in summer. “It’s too hot here then,” says Mr Fei, the oil-city man, though he admits he is thinking of settling in Sanya full-time. Rather like Florida’s “snowbirds”, many rent an apartment just for the winter.
Fewer than 100,000 migrant pensioners live on the island year round, thinks Mr Huang. But there are signs that more are settling. Half of those he interviewed said they ha
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