Shanghai Street View: Filial Turning Point 沪经动向：孝道转折点

This week I want to look at an interesting trend that has seen a growing number of foreign firms look to Shanghai as a test bed for assisted living communities, a popular western concept for elderly people who want to continue living independently despite limitations brought on by age. The idea of letting one’s parents spend their golden years living with other elderly people while under the care of strangers is strange and unfamiliar for most Chinese, whose culture counts filial piety as one of its most basic tenets.

As recently as 20 years ago, one could rarely visit the home of a Chinese friend or acquaintance without finding an elderly parent quietly sitting around the apartment, or helping to raise the children or perform other daily household tasks. But lots has changed in the last 20 years, most notably the increasing affluence of a growing middle class that can now afford such luxuries as paying for their parents to living in nursing homes and a newer generation of assisted living facilities.

Still, I was highly skeptical that many Chinese would accept this new form of living arrangement for their parents that seems to contradict many of the culture’s oldest traditions. So I put the question to a number of friends and got some surprising results that I’ll discuss shortly.

But before I do, let’s take a look at this growing phenomenon that has seen new foreign-backed assisted living projects announced in Shanghai with growing frequency, most of them aimed at the higher end of the market. A quick online search revealed a number of new projects announced for the city in the past 2 years, with US names like Fortress Investments, Emeritus Senior Living and Columbia Pacific all backing new projects.

The companies are clearly focusing on Shanghai due to its relative wealth compared with the rest of China, and also for its relatively progressive values versus more conservative smaller cities. At the same time, these companies realize a new generation of young, white-collar Chinese are facing the growing issue of what to do as they become the main support for their aging parents, since many of them only children as a result of the nation’s one-child policy.

So I conducted my poll among around a dozen friends and acquaintances of widely different ages and geographic backgrounds to try and gauge whether these new projects are likely to succeed or simply end up as white elephants. As I indicated earlier, the results were both interesting and somewhat surprising, and perhaps don’t bode too well for these new projects under development here in Shanghai over the short term.

Generally speaking, the people most open to putting their parents in these new retirement communities were white collar workers who had come to Shanghai from other provinces. By comparison, actual Shanghainese were quite conservative, with nearly everyone saying they would be highly unlikely to seriously consider such an option.

In the former category, one friend originally from the northern city of Harbin summed up the situation for people in similar situations to his own. In today’s increasingly mobile Chinese society, he said, many young people choose to develop their careers in big cities like Shanghai where opportunities are greater and the fast pace of life is more to their liking. Their parents, by comparison, enjoy the familiar environs of the cities where they have lived all their lives and are often reluctant to follow their children to big cities like Shanghai. That makes the option of living with one’s children difficult, with the result that assisted living communities and nursing homes become one of the few viable options.

By comparison, most Shanghainese still live in the same city as their parents, meaning it’s much more practical for everyone to live together. One native Shanghai friend even recounted for me a “horror” story of an ashamed elderly relative who complained at every chance about her daughter’s decision to send her to a nursing home after the daughter moved abroad.

If one takes these 2 viewpoints as representative of broader society, it certainly appears that demand for assisted living facilities will boom as China becomes an increasingly mobile society. The only problem is, demand for those facilities could actually reside in mid-sized and smaller cities, as members of a growing middle class move to big cities from their hometowns and look for alternatives to provide care for their parents as they age.

At the end of the day I suspect that even local Shanghainese will follow this trend towards reliance on nursing homes and assisted living facilities for their parents over the longer term. But in the meantime, such facilities could struggle for acceptance in the shorter term from a society where many people are still reluctant to abandon traditions of filial piety that stretch back for centuries.