Elderly apartment scams are unbearable for seniors
China News Weekly reporter / Zhang Xinyu
Published in the 1053rd issue of "China News Weekly" on July 25, 2022
During the few days in Changsha, I saw many elderly people who wanted to live in nursing homes.
Huang Guoliang is one of the more typical one.
His two daughters both work and live in Guangzhou, and when his wife was alive, he was willing to live with them.
After his wife passed away, Huang Guoliang, who was ill, began to feel that he was a burden. "My daughters are busy with work, and I can't do anything to help. I want them to take care of me. I'm an old man. I look ugly and smelly. My daughter is tired, and I’m afraid that my son-in-law’s family won’t like my daughter.” Back in Changsha, Huang Guoliang pinned his hopes on the nursing home in the nursing home.
Although "home-based care" and "child support" are still the way of care for many Chinese elderly people, more and more elderly people hope to spend their later years in elderly care institutions.
More than 20,000 elderly people, including Huang Guoliang, were deceived by the old-age fantasy woven by the Shunxiang Pension. Many elderly people invested their life savings, and some even sold their only real estate, just to book a more apartment in the pension. Good beds, but this retirement apartment is just a pretense for criminals to get money.
Similar scams are not only taking place in Hunan.
In recent months, courts, procuratorates, and public security bureaus in Hubei, Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Inner Mongolia and other places have reported similar cases.
Sun Juanjuan, a professor at the School of Sociology and Demography at Renmin University of China, said that China's aging is characterized by a large scale, rapid growth and high proportion of the elderly population, as well as "getting old before getting rich", that is, China's per capita GDP or per capita income level is not high. Under these circumstances, the proportion of the elderly population has reached a relatively high level, and has entered an aging society ahead of schedule.
In this context, many old-age care institutions in the past were shoddy, prepared for poor elderly people who were childless or disabled.
Now, we need more diversified elderly care institutions, but there is still an imbalance between supply and demand in social elderly care services, and there is a huge gap in elderly care beds.
How to promote the development of pension institutions as soon as possible is a big challenge.
After 2013, the "Opinions on Accelerating the Development of the Elderly Service Industry" and other policies to encourage social forces to set up elderly care institutions were promulgated, and the elderly care industry began to enter a period of rapid development.
However, after a large amount of private capital poured into the blue ocean for pensions, chaos in various industries also appeared.
Private elderly care institutions need support and strict supervision.
Since 2019, a series of documents have been issued at the national level, proposing to strengthen the rectification of illegal fundraising in the field of elderly care services.
On February 24, 2022, the Supreme People's Court also revised the Criminal Judicial Interpretation of Illegal Fund-raising, emphasizing the severe punishment of the crime of illegal fund-raising in the field of elderly care.
For the management of pension fraud, in addition to strict handling afterwards, prevention in advance is also extremely important.
On the streets of Changsha now, banners such as "Improve the ability to recognize fraud and prevent fraud, and crack down on pension fraud" can be seen everywhere.
Several elderly people told me that they hoped that after their experiences were written, more elderly people could be prevented from being deceived.
"China News Weekly" Issue 27, 2022
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