New Twist on Saving for Old Age

Han Wenzhen lives alone in a one-room apartment with no heat, no hot water and no indoor bathroom. A separate kitchen, shared by three families, is hard to reach using her crutches.

But this is home, and the 75-year-old retired textile worker can’t imagine living here without frequent visits from her neighbor. He Min, also 75, has no physical ailments and plenty of time on her hands. She delights in warming Han’s apartment with extra food from her own table and juicy gossip from the outside world.

What appears to be an ordinary arrangement between two grandmothers, however, is a potentially groundbreaking program for a country facing the monumental task of caring for the world’s largest elderly population.

Han and He are participants in an unusual experiment in Shanghai called Time Bank. It is the first program in China to use able-bodied retirees to help other elderly people in need and to do it without relying on government money, expensive nursing homes or the children of those it aids.

It works like a savings account. The hours spent helping others are logged in a book and monitored by the government’s neighborhood committees. Those hours can be exchanged, one for one, for the labor of a new generation of helpers when the current caregivers are in need.

“This old couple’s today is my tomorrow,” said Xue Xiuzhen, 61, who recently started working with Bao Linzhen and her husband, both 84. She also cares for her own 90-year-old mother. “If we don’t care about them now, we don’t care about our own future.”

Shanghai is eager to make the program work because this city is graying faster than any other in China. About 2.4 million people here are older than 60. That’s 18% of the city’s population, compared with the national average of 10%, according to the Institute of Population and Development Studies at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences.

On average, people in Shanghai live six years longer than those elsewhere in China, at least in part because of the city’s higher standard of living. The life expectancy here, at 75 years, is one year shy of the U.S. average. In 2030, Shanghai’s elderly population is expected to soar to 4.6 million. By then, China as a whole will have an estimated 275 million elderly people--more than the current total U.S. population.

“The society’s burden is getting heavier and heavier,” said the population institute’s director, Sun Changmin. “The Time Bank concept is very unusual and has the potential to be a breakthrough idea in this country.”

In the United States, similar volunteer projects have operated at various times in Florida, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Illinois, New York, Delaware and Michigan.

The efforts have been experimental, and none has involved a large share of the local elderly population. The initial participants have been enthusiastic, but organizers say it is difficult to find enough people willing to join the program and stay in it long enough to make the services available on a reliable basis.

Project Considered a Work in Progress

Shanghai’s Time Bank began about a year ago and has grown to about 100 caregivers and clients. It’s still considered a work in progress; organizers want to keep the program small while they work out any kinks. So far they say it has cost the government nothing more than the time of the local officials who monitor and publicize its progress. But other municipalities are showing interest.

It’s fitting that the innovative concept debuted in this trend-setting city--birthplace of the Chinese Communist Party and the country’s first post-Mao stock market.

The first retirees to volunteer for the program live in Hongkou, a section of old Shanghai that shelters one of the city’s highest concentrations of elderly people. In contrast to the building boom that has changed much of the city’s skyline, Hongkou’s weather-beaten structures were left by foreign powers who carved up Shanghai after the 19th century Opium Wars.

This tight-knit community was once part of a U.S. settlement and housed thousands of Jewish refugees who fled the Russian Revolution and Nazi Germany. Han’s living quarters were converted from a ground-floor garage, part of a three-floor walk-up once owned by a Jewish family. Now 16 Chinese families live in the building.

The foreigners are long gone. Young people too are starting to leave the neighborhood, lured by job opportunities and modern high-rises.

“We try to target low-income elderly people who do not have help from their own children,” said Gu Weixin, the deputy director of the local residence committee and one of Time Bank’s organizers. “We look at old people as a valuable human resource. Their labor could also be turned into money in the bank for their own future use.”

Not all of the volunteers are retirees. Zhang Landi, at 46 one of the youngest Time Bank helpers, was laid off from her factory job last year. Her daughter is away at college, and her husband is a sailor who touches land only a few times a year. Aiding 85-year-old Wang Shouxing is a way for Zhang to keep busy and feel useful.

“I saw that she is always by herself. I wondered if she gets bored and lonely, so I volunteered to sit with her and talk to her about her health or nutrition needs,” Zhang said. “When I am 70 or 80, I’m sure someone else will come help me.”

Traditionally, China’s young cared for its old. But the country’s strictly enforced one-child policy reduced the size of the typical Chinese family and shrank the ranks of those able to care for the elderly.

In addition, while work units provided cradle-to-cremation protection for Chinese laborers before the beginning of market reforms in the late 1970s, overburdened state industries now are pressured to get rid of deadwood. Employees fired before their prime survive on meager allowances as they seek new jobs. Older retirees sometimes must wait years before getting reimbursed for medical expenses. A new universal social security system has yet to take shape.

Meanwhile, people like Han are grateful to collect what they can from their former jobs. She gets the equivalent of about $70 a month--not enough to pay for a nursing home, which costs about $115 a month. Even if they can afford it, most elderly shy away from such facilities because of the shameful implication that their children have abandoned them.

In the cramped old homes of Hongkou, thriftiness is a way of life. Most of the houses lack central heating; the elderly stay warm by bundling up in padded jackets and pants. Some children install electric heaters in the units, only to find that their parents would rather hug hot water bottles all day than run up their electric bills.

Any money the elderly save is often splurged on children and grandchildren. For Chinese New Year, Han saved up about $23 in good luck money to give her only grandson, an 18-year-old hotel cook. That’s after lavishing him with the same sum on his birthday and again on Children’s Day on June 1, plus about $35 to help him replace a stolen bicycle.

Han doesn’t like to admit it, but it would be nice if her 51-year-old daughter could visit more often. At the very least she could then help Han wash her hair, which requires heating a big pot of water, carrying it to a plastic washbasin and mixing it with cold water from the faucet. Even with help, the grandmother can tolerate the difficult task only once a month. So she likes to keep her hair short--whenever her son-in-law can spare the time to cut it.

“Big families must break into smaller families; you have to change with the times,” said Han, stressing that she is a longtime Communist Party member and can tough out anything.

‘It Enriches My Life’

In many ways, her helper, He, is her new family. The straight-shooting former nurse with a booming voice often comes knocking at 6 a.m. and spends an average of four hours a day with the soft-spoken Han. While Han can warm up her own breakfast of powdered milk and leftover rice in the microwave her daughter bought her, she counts on He to empty her bedpan, read the newspaper aloud and go to the post office once a month for her retirement money. The rest of their time together, the two enjoy sewing bedroom slippers to give away as gifts.

“It makes me happy to help. It enriches my life. If I sit there and do nothing, I would be wasting my life anyway,” said He, who doesn’t like to keep track of her volunteer hours, which could easily top 1,000 for the last year. She also brushes aside the suggestion that someone else might not be able to return the favor with the same gusto.

“When I get old,” the 75-year-old He said, “I hope I die suddenly. I don’t need anybody’s help.”

The growing number of people drawn to Time Bank, however, are interested not just in giving but also in receiving. So the program needs to provide all participants with an adequate sense of security, the population institute’s Sun said.

“The potential volunteers will want to know: What if I move? What if my children move? There is no legal certainty I’ll get my time back,” Sun said.

Organizers stress that the program is only a supplement to the country’s overall social security system, which is in need of revamping. Until then, they count on the government to expand Time Bank’s reach, so volunteers who move can tap into their savings accounts wherever they go. City officials also are working to formalize the contract with the volunteers rather than continue to rely on handwritten pieces of paper.

“But the fact that people are responding to the program is very interesting,” Sun said. “Whether it will continue to expand depends on how the government is willing to support and protect this new idea.”

Skeptics wonder if Time Bank will have the same appeal in the future for the current younger generation, which grew up in a consumer culture far removed from the sacrifices that defined its grandparents’ lives.

“It’s a good solution, but it might be a one-shot deal,” said Dr. Lois Bitner Olson, a San Diego State University professor of marketing who recently researched consumer behavior among Shanghai’s young. “The current generation is much more self-centered. I don’t think they will have time to volunteer.”

The old people, however, want desperately for the spirit of Time Bank to rub off on the young.

“When we go to the homes of these elderly neighbors, the young people are wondering what we are doing,” said Xue, the 61-year-old who assists the 84-year-old couple. “We explain to them: ‘We are the children of these old people; we are here to help.’ After a while, how could they just stand there and watch?”

Robert A. Rosenblatt of The Times’ Washington Bureau contributed to this report.