Delaying Retirement via Procedural Shortcut: The Fragile Promises of China’s Lawmaking Reforms

On 16 November 1957, China’s labour minister Ma Wenrui appeared before the country’s top legislature, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPCSC), with proposed updates to China’s retirement scheme. Faced with a deluge of secondary-school graduates but insufficient job openings, the government hoped to make it easier for older workers to retire (Literature Research Office 2015: 527). The proposal would, in general, require men to retire at age 60, white-collar women at 55, and blue-collar women at 50 (State Council 1957). Women must retire earlier, officials contended, because they were ‘generally weaker’ than men (General Office et al. 1958: 9). As was typical of the time (Kan 2019: 53), the NPCSC endorsed the proposal ‘in principle’ the same day, while allowing the State Council to fine-tune the rules before finalising them (Xinhua 1957a). The State Council soon distributed the draft law to localities for consultation (Xinhua 1957b) and later reported that more than 3.1 million workers participated in discussions over the following month (Ma 1958). Some (unsuccessfully) questioned the disparate treatment of white-collar and blue-collar female workers, but there was otherwise no serious objection to the proposed changes, according to an official account (Ma 1958). The State Council (1958) formally promulgated the rules in February 1958.

During the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), China’s nascent retirement system suffered a fatal blow (Xia 2019a). Ultra-radicals attacked the country’s earliest social insurance scheme for ‘breeding loafers’ (养懒汉) and ‘corrupting the working class’ (腐蚀工人阶级) (Yun 1999: 20). The movement soon paralysed the entire labour bureaucracy. By the end of the decade-long turmoil, more than 2 million eligible workers were waiting for the state to process their retirement applications (Xia 2019b). To clear the backlog and reinvigorate the workforce, the State Council came to the NPCSC with a new pair of retirement rules in May 1978—just weeks after the legislature had resumed regular meetings after the Cultural Revolution. Some of the 1958 rules no longer suited the circumstances and needed updates, the State Council said (Xinhua 1978). Among other changes, its proposal would reinstate separate retirement systems for ‘workers’ (工人) and ‘cadres’ (干部), which roughly corresponded to manual and nonmanual labourers under previous rules (Wu 2021; Kuei and Peng 2013: 30); create a special retirement status (with full salary) for veteran cadres; and otherwise treat ordinary cadres and workers equally, along with a general increase in their pension benefits (Feng 1986; Manion 1992). The State Council proposed no change, however, to the 1958 retirement ages. The NPCSC swiftly approved the rules ‘in principle’ after a two-day session (Xinhua 1978). The default retirement ages would remain in place, as it turned out, until almost half a century later.

Meanwhile, China experienced a sea change in demographics. Life expectancy has risen rapidly, from 48.8 years in 1958 to 72 by the turn of the century, and to 78 today (UN DESA 2024). Due to socioeconomic development and the One-Child Policy, fertility in China has declined in an equally swift fashion: it has dropped far below the replacement level of 2.1 births per woman since the 1990s and is now among the lowest in the world (Cai 2013: 382–83; Cai and Cheng 2015: 46). Together, these two forces—rising longevity and declining fertility—have accelerated population ageing, which in turn has led to a shrinking workforce, mounting pressure on healthcare and social security systems, and widening welfare inequities among different social groups (Zhu and Walker 2021: 192–95; Mao et al. 2020: 284–85; see also SCIO 2021). The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences projected in 2019 that, if the trend continues, China’s main pension fund will run out of money by 2035 (Li 2019).

Delaying retirement, as the Chinese leadership was well aware, could mitigate those problems by replenishing the labour force and the pension fund (Feng et al. 2018: 31–34). The labour ministry studied such a move as early as 2005 (Bai 2012), before the Chinese Communist Party eventually added it to the official reform agenda in late 2013 (Central Committee 2013). Since then, the Party has repeatedly vowed to raise retirement ages, most recently at the Third Plenum of its Twentieth Central Committee in July 2024 (Central Committee 2015, 2020, 2024; Xi 2022). Yet, any retirement delay would have a direct, tangible impact on hundreds of millions of Chinese, who have, for more than a decade, consistently and overwhelmingly opposed the idea in successive polls conducted by various state media outlets (Han 2014: 129–30; Zhou 2016; The Economist 2021). At the top of their concerns were youth unemployment, age discrimination against older workers, and the loss of childcare provided by retired grandparents (The Economist 2021; Bao 2013). Because of the move’s unpopularity, no concrete plan to raise the retirement ages materialised—until last autumn.

On 10 September 2024, the NPCSC suddenly announced that it was considering legislation to raise retirement ages, without the usual prior indication that a bill was in the pipeline, much less drafted and ready for legislative deliberation. Three days later, it passed the ‘Decision on Gradually Raising the Statutory Retirement Ages’ (关于实施渐进式延迟法定退休年龄的决定) (NPCSC 2024, translated in Wei and Hu 2024), or the ‘Reform Plan’. The Reform Plan has three core provisions: first, it gradually raises the retirement age, over 15 years, to 63 for men, 58 for women in managerial or specialist positions (that is, redefined ‘cadres’; see Zhong 2024), and 55 for women in other roles (that is, redefined ‘workers’); second, it will gradually increase the minimum years of contribution required to receive post-retirement benefits from 15 to 20; and third, it allows for ‘flexible’ retirement, whereby eligible employees may retire up to three years earlier or later. The Reform Plan took effect on 1 January 2025.

Though the swift process was reminiscent of the way the NPCSC set and reaffirmed the original retirement ages decades earlier, the times are different. Much like China’s demographics, the NPCSC’s legislative procedure has undergone a profound transformation in the interim. As we will explain, the Chinese legislature has embraced, in rhetoric and in practice, procedural reforms that grant lawmakers more time to review and propose changes to legislative drafts, while considering the views of a broad range of stakeholders, including the public. Yet, that deliberative process was wholly absent from the momentous retirement reform, laying bare the fragility of the legislature’s promises.

‘Scientific, Democratic, and Law-Based Lawmaking’

In official discourse, China’s post–Cultural Revolution lawmaking reforms have been subsumed under the slogan of ‘scientific, democratic, and law-based lawmaking’ (科学立法、民主立法、依法立法). According to an authoritative commentary by legislative officials, this trifecta of principles entails both substantive and procedural commands (Shen and Xu 2019: 390). Legislation must address actual issues and ‘reasonably’ prescribe the rights and obligations of private and state entities; must ‘reflect the will of the people’; and must conform to higher-level norms in China’s legislative hierarchy (Shen and Xu 2019: 395–99). And such goals are achievable only with a process that, among others, promotes thorough and informed deliberations and incorporates public participation.

The NPCSC first moved to extend legislative deliberations. For about the first 30 years of its existence, the Chinese legislature passed all but a few bills after a quick single review, as the 1957 and 1978 retirement laws illustrate (Kan 2019: 53). It began to move away from this approach soon after legislative business resumed after the Cultural Revolution. To ‘prevent hasty deliberations and imprudent considerations from undermining the stability of the law’, legislative leaders decided in March 1983 to generally add an extra review to allot more time for discussing and improving draft laws (Council of Chairpersons 1983). This two-review process was then codified in 1987 in the NPCSC’s rules of procedure (Kan 2019: 54). To some lawmakers, this longer time frame nonetheless still felt ‘hasty’, as they worried that the quality of legislation would suffer from insufficient time to digest certain bills. With a third review down the line, they could instead use the second reading for ‘in-depth discussions over a draft law’s key issues, contentious points, and areas of disagreement’. The NPCSC leadership endorsed this proposal in April 1998, believing that more thorough deliberations would promote ‘the quality and efficiency of legislation’ (Li 1998: 177). The three-review rule was formally codified in the landmark Legislation Law (立法法) in 2000 and still applies today (with exceptions for uncontroversial, simple, or emergency bills).

The lengthier legislative process in turn created the space for public consultations, which over time have become another key feature of Chinese lawmaking. In January 1988, the NPCSC carried out the first public consultation on a draft law under the current (post-1982) constitutional order (Ai 2014). It published the draft in national newspapers and requested that citizens send in comments by mail. It was not until 2005 that public participation eventually shifted online and instantly reached new heights. The very first bill released on the legislature’s website, a draft Property Law (物权法), received 9,605 comments—almost three times the record of the comment-by-mail era (Ai 2014). Despite the technological upgrade, the NPCSC remained highly selective in its consultations, releasing only 13 drafts during the 20 years after the 1988 consultation. But legislative leaders soon instituted improvements. They first required in 2008 that the legislature generally solicit comment on the first draft of every bill, before extending that soft requirement to any additional non-final draft of a bill five years later (Ai 2014; Shen 2009: 1500). Almost 350 drafts have been released since 2008 as a result.

In the meantime, the Chinese legislature has implemented additional reforms to broaden informational input into legislative deliberations. They include involving academics and other experts at various stages of the legislative process—from formulating legislative agendas to revising draft laws, to assessing legislation’s feasibility, impact, and potential enforcement problems prior to enactment—and establishing ‘grassroots legislative outreach offices’ (基层立法联系点) to proactively solicit public input (Shen and Xu 2019: 407–10; Horsley 2010: 293–97; Chen 2023). And, as we have alluded to, the legislature has always allowed for expedited legislative review under specified circumstances and reserved the discretion to waive public consultation when necessary. But the default process—three reviews coupled with two rounds of public consultation—remains the standard (Wei and Hu 2023).

When the Party reiterated the goal of raising retirement ages at the 2024 Third Plenum—this time with apparent urgency—the NPCSC found itself between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, the reform is wide-ranging and deeply unpopular, as discussed earlier. It is also quite complex, which has led policy experts to propose a range of options based on different combinations of the relevant parameters (Feng et al. 2018). The case for following the standard process to evaluate these proposals and their implications could not have been stronger. On the other hand, doing so would have opened the floodgates to a deluge of comments. The public would have seized on an opportunity to air their views, as they did with comparable social legislation in the past; the labour contract legislation of 2007 and 2012, for example, together received almost 750,000 comments (Harper Ho and Huang 2014: 1009; Gallagher 2017: 68). So, too, would experts have eagerly offered their input. The sheer amount of information would inevitably have compelled the NPCSC to prolong the process by months, if not years, especially given the strong possibility that an overwhelming majority of public comments would have opposed the reform (Bai 2013). This prospect would have been politically untenable.

Faced with this dilemma, the NPCSC ultimately chose political expediency: it enacted the Reform Plan as a ‘quasi-statutory decision’ (QSD, 准法律决定; Wang 2011: 92), a category of legislation exempt from the procedural paradigm. Officially known as ‘decisions on legal issues’ (有关法律问题的决定), QSDs are not ‘statutes’ (法律) but nonetheless carry statutory force (Huang 2014: 14; see also Wei 2021). Because the NPCSC adheres to the unwritten principle that a statute should be comprehensive and infrequently amended, QSDs fill important gaps. Ordinarily, they are short instruments designed to address narrow issues, tackle urgent matters when a comprehensive statute cannot be drafted in time, or develop new legal schemes without formal statutory changes (Qin and Liu 2017: 213–14; Jin 2018: 154–55). For these reasons, since 1987, NPCSC rules have allowed it to adopt a QSD after a single review without public consultation, even as its legislative process has otherwise grown more sophisticated. Over the past two decades, the legislature has rarely taken a second look at a QSD, and, even when it did, it never solicited public comment.

The Reform Plan’s unusual features suggest the State Council may have deliberately exploited that abbreviated process. Like a typical QSD, it begins with a brief (five-article) main text, which announces the new retirement ages and lays down general principles for implementing the reform (NPCSC 2024: 720). Then, in a break with convention, the Reform Plan proceeds to a separately titled, visually distinct document: ‘Measures of the State Council on Gradually Raising the Statutory Retirement Ages’ (国务院关于渐进式延迟法定退休年龄的办法; our emphasis). Despite appearances to the contrary, officials emphasised that this lengthy document is an integral part of the Reform Plan (Constitution and Law Committee 2024). The Measures introduce the other two pillars of the reform (longer pension contribution periods and flexible retirement), address various subsidiary issues (such as the application of the reform to unemployed individuals), and include detailed charts that allow affected citizens to look up their new retirement ages and contribution periods (NPCSC 2024: 720–34). This level of detail brings the Reform Plan closer to a statute than an average reform-initiating QSD.

In addition, the State Council likely drafted the bill in a manner designed to restrict meaningful legislative review of the Measures. The Reform Plan’s main text states that the NPCSC ‘approved’ (批准) the Measures—indicating that lawmakers, at best, had less room than usual to propose changes to the embedded document and, at worst, had to vote on it as drafted (Wang 2012: 483). As evidence, the Reform Plan’s accompanying legislative report addresses only lawmaker comments on the short main text (Constitution and Law Committee 2024). While it is true that the State Council also drafted and submitted the 1957 and 1978 retirement laws—both under its name—for the NPCSC’s ‘approval’, the legal landscape of the time necessitated that process. Before 1982, the NPCSC’s legislative power was far more circumscribed than it is today, while the State Council had no authority at all to issue binding regulations. In response to the heightened legislative demand shortly after the PRC’s founding and the Cultural Revolution, the NPCSC resorted to legislating, in part, by approving documents that the State Council sought to issue (Chen 2016: 71; Luo 2019: 163). The 1982 Constitution subsequently expanded the legislative powers of both institutions and more clearly demarcated the boundaries of their authority. Reviving that archaic practice in 2024 was thus not only unnecessary but also legally dubious under today’s constitutional framework (Chen 2016: 70). Not to mention the resulting Reform Plan—an NPCSC enactment with a component bearing the State Council’s name—is an odd hybrid previously unknown to Chinese law.

That said, the State Council’s drafting choices could not—and indeed should not—have bound the NPCSC. The latter was free to rewrite the Reform Plan so that it contained a unified text. It also faced no legal obstacles to waiving the single-review exception and conducting further review, as it could with any QSD. There has long been scholarly argument that QSDs, like statutes, should comply with the Legislation Law; otherwise, this Law would become a ‘dead letter’ (形同虚设), as the legislature could simply circumvent its more stringent procedures by enacting important legislation as QSDs (Jiang 2012: 32; see also Jiang 2023: 105–6). This view finds additional support in the March 2023 amendments to the Legislation Law, which added a new article applying ‘the relevant provisions’ of the Law to QSDs. This new clause is admittedly cryptic. But there is early scholarly agreement (which we second) that it requires, at a minimum, that QSDs creating or modifying generally applicable legal schemes—such as the Reform Plan—follow the same procedures as statutes: three reviews with public consultations, unless a specified exception applies (Jiang 2024: 1377–78; Tan 2024: 34). No such exception would have applied to the Reform Plan.

‘Breaching the Contract with an Entire Generation’

The public predictably reacted to the Reform Plan with ire, confusion, and anxiety. Yet, it is now only possible to glimpse that reaction through contemporaneous press coverage, as China’s censorship machine swiftly kicked into high gear after the document’s release. According to The Economist (2024), of the more than 5,200 replies to Xinhua’s Weibo post announcing the news, only about two dozen remained visible just four days later—‘none of them disapproving’. Most recorded comments expressed apprehension about the reform’s substantive impact on people’s livelihoods (The Economist 2024; Ng 2024; Woo and Qi 2024; Li 2024). Few directly attacked the lack of process, though that concern underlay posts worrying about a sudden further delay in retirement.

That sentiment more clearly drove netizens to widely circulate an 11-year-old front-page commentary from the China Youth Daily (中国青年报). That 2013 piece by Cao Lin, the outlet’s then chief commentator, responded to a social security official’s call to delay retirement—a few months before the Party would officially endorse the proposal. Among other criticisms, Cao rebuked the suggestion that the Chinese public should stomach a future delay in retirement simply because it is ‘a common international practice’. He argued that laws and policies, especially those that ‘concern significant public interests’, must provide the people with ‘stable expectations’. ‘The age of retirement and the timing of pension payments,’ he stressed, ‘are the state’s commitments to and agreements with the people—contracts that must not be breached lightly.’ He observed that retirement reforms in developed countries followed ‘due legal process, democratic channels, and consultation with the people’. If China were to dispense with the necessary processes, it would ‘breach the contract with an entire generation’ (与一代人的违约), Cao presciently warned. Eleven years later, reposts of his op-ed were quickly censored and the original disappeared from the newspaper’s online archives (Li 2024).

The Chinese state’s impulse to pass the Reform Plan hastily was understandable, as strong public opposition had forced it to repeatedly postpone the reform over the past decade (The Economist 2021). By pushing the whole package through the legislature on a highly expedited timeline, it could present the reform as a fait accompli, thereby rendering moot public calls for reconsideration and pre-empting attempts to bargain with the government over specifics. Yet, by settling for a quick fix for the looming crisis, the Chinese Government myopically sacrificed the greater benefits it could have gained by extending the legislative timetable—even by just a few months—to allow for further deliberation and consultation.

The NPCSC itself has recognised that ‘public participation can bolster the legality and fairness of legislative decision-making’ (Shen and Xu 2019: 397). As it elaborated in a 2019 volume touting its legislative accomplishments: ‘When the decision-making process is undemocratic and public participation insufficient, the enacted laws may present the will of only a minority, making them unjust; they may also lie dormant once enacted, failing to solve actual problems’ (Shen and Xu 2019: 397). Taking the time to publicly justify the Reform Plan and to credibly consult the public on such a complex and far-reaching matter—just as the State Council did in 1957—could have, in the best case envisioned by the NPCSC, fostered ‘a sense of identification’ (认同感) with the reform (Research Office 2019: 51–52) and ‘raise[d] the public’s willingness to abide by’ it (Shen and Xu 2019: 397). At a minimum, it could have ‘confer[red] procedural legitimacy on the NPCSC, the process, and the resulting legislation’ and ‘help[ed] lessen, if not prevent, opposition’ to the reform (Horsley 2020).

In comparison, the costs of cutting procedural corners here were immense. Not only did this move stand in tension with the NPCSC’s decades-long procedural reforms and cast doubt on China’s commitment to ‘scientific, democratic, and law-based lawmaking’, but it also needlessly damaged the legislature’s own credibility and legitimacy and sowed distrust in the legislative process. After all, the average Chinese citizen is unlikely to grasp the NPCSC’s procedural intricacies well enough to identify the Reform Plan as a QSD and to understand that it could be passed through an abridged process. And, given that officials had promised—time and time again (Bai 2012, 2015, 2016a, 2016b; Bao 2013; SCIO 2021)—to consult the public on any retirement reform, citizens were especially justified in expecting such an opportunity in this case. In the end, taking the procedural shortcut did not—and could not—end the controversy over delaying retirement, despite the censors’ best efforts. It would only make the next unpopular but necessary reform in China that much harder to enact.

Featured image: Alxander Schimmeck (CC), Unsplash.

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