A recent article in The Washington Post described a troubling new business trend in China, renting out adult grandchildren to elderly people who lack caring children and grandchildren of their own.
It’s Just Business
The article tries to present this bit of commerce in objective tones. It notes that the Chinese population aged sixty and over is increasing and will soon exceed a quarter of the population. More than half of them live alone. Additionally, China faces a shortfall of elder-care nurses, numbering roughly five-and-a-half million. Of course, the primary agent in this process is the disastrous “one child policy” which China’s authoritarian government imposed from 1979 to 2015, although its antecedents go back to the fifties.
The rest of the article treats the whole process in a surprisingly businesslike tone. Readers learn that most caregivers are young adults, and for many, this work supplements their regular jobs. “These surrogates, mostly in their 20s and 30s,” the article spells out, “provide companionship rather than specialized medical care, visiting, chatting, helping clients set up smartphones or accompanying them to medical appointments.” Rates run from $29.00 to $88.00 for a three-hour session.
The workers are actually employees of several providers who advertise widely. The companies are optimistic about future growth. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), always a consideration in any transaction, apparently approves of the system.
Small Dosages of Mild Criticism
The only oblique criticism is that the hired caregivers have easy access to the client’s identification documents, medical records and property ownership assets. This could lead to fraud, but the article only hints at the idea and provides no examples of actual incidents.
However, the article leaves out much. The leftist hordes at the Post are always leery of any substantial criticism of the CCP, and China’s rather bizarre mix of Communist government with a highly regulated, pseudo-free-market economy. Except for the required glancing mention of the one-child policy, this could be a normal business in any prosperous nation anywhere on the globe. There is no mention that many of these elderly Chinese spent their youth under Mao Zedong’s devastating and ultimately failed “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.” Nor does it inform readers about the iron control that Xi Jinping maintains on Chinese culture and, by extension, the lives of the people renting their “grandchildren.”
The last line in the Post article quotes the owner of one of the businesses, one with the oddly descriptive name of Time Bank. His firm currently receives one hundred “orders” each month, but hopes to increase that number to 650. “If we can meet their needs,” he optimistically stated in words that could apply to any business, “people will eventually accept our services… We are envisioning a future where senior home care is as easy as ordering takeout.”
Melancholia
Yet there is the undeniable, and almost unutterable sadness in the situation. These older Chinese are renting the young adults to provide the affection and companionship of the grandchildren they lack. Indeed, they could never have grandchildren but at best a single grandchild.
How this service fits with the vision of Mao—and Lenin before him—who promoted the destruction of the traditional family and replaced it with the child’s guardianship by the state. Old people eventually become useless to the state. A service offering to ease the path to oblivion is a logical consequence of the communist state’s materialistic vision of humanity.
Perceiving Reality
As with any article that points out problems in the communist world, there is the requisite caveat that many Americans face such problems as well. “The U.S. population is aging, too, and while elderly people may hire household helpers or companions, The Washington Post was unable to find any American business that marketed them as surrogate children.”
However, readers should not be fooled by the tone of articles such as this. The Washington Post knows that most Americans care little about the vagaries of aging in China. They print little pieces like this to promote a narrative that conditions in the communist world are, by and large, comparable to those in the United States. This is, of course, a fiction.
Anyone who wants the truth about aging in China needs only look at the life of imprisoned journalist Jimmy Lai, who, at age eighty, is rotting in jail for daring to oppose the communist tyranny in the “people’s paradise.”
Photo Credit: © Tom Wang – stock.adobe.com
First Published on TFP.org