The government of east China's Shandong Province, to make more complete its regulations and legislation on family issues, has turned its attention to the elderly. It has studied extensively the issues of eldercare and how they are handled in other provinces, as well as overseas. Now, a regulation is being drafted that will provide detailed guidance on caring for the province's senior citizens.

The Regulation on Family Support for the Elderly says that support for senior citizens should be the joint responsibility of family, individual, government and society. However, given Shandong's still-immature development of private pensions, the eldercare industry, and retirement allowances and endowment insurance, families must take the leading role.

Wider social trends are having an impact on the lives of senior citizens. Rapid urbanization means traditional extended-family households are being replaced with nuclear families. Moreover, increasing mobility does not often apply to the older generations: the younger people move to cities to find better jobs, but their parents and grandparents stay behind in the country. As a result, the number of civil cases involving eldercare has been increasing by two percentage points annually.

Huang Guanglei, a lawyer with the Gaoxin Law Firm in Shandong, says that the existing Civil Law, Marriage Law, Law on Protection of Rights and Interests of the Elderly and others are too vague to be of practical use. For example, says Huang, there is no guidance for determining support payments: departments handling such cases have to interpret and apply the laws as best they can, while also considering the local economic situation, the number of children, their incomes and other factors.

Housing interests of the elderly are also a frequent issue, says Huang, and the main reason is that there is no clearly spelled out law concerning senior citizens' housing standards, repair obligations or ownership rights.

The new regulation will provide detailed requirements concerning the financial and emotional support that a family must give its elders, as well as living care and special needs.

However, the regulation does acknowledge the changing social environment. While a family cannot pay others to assume the responsibility of caring for its elderly, it can assume the responsibility itself by paying others to provide the care. Nursing homes, nurses or assistants may be employed, thus lightening the burden of the family's responsibility.

(China.org.cn by Zhang Tingting, May 18, 2004)