Read the article: Adapting health, economic, and social policies to address population aging in China (nature.com).
This joint review project was led by Professor Evandro Fei Fang (University of Oslo and member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters), together with Dr. Yuan Fang (University of Oslo), Professor Huachun Zou (Fudan University), and Professor Jing Wu (University of Gothenburg), with interdisciplinary contributions from more than 30 global experts (Figure 1).
The review seeks to provide a comprehensive and authoritative assessment of China’s progress, challenges, and policy options in response to population aging in the context of major breakthroughs in basic and translational research, shifts in healthcare paradigms, evolving socio-economic-political dynamics, and policy innovations.
The authors synthesize China’s current policies towards promoting healthy longevity in the general population, focusing on social health insurance, long-term care insurance (LTCI), community and home-based care, and palliative care, as well as gerontological research, public health prevention, and nutritional and medical interventions, while identifying strengths and gaps.
The authors propose a multi-level framework (Figure 2) to tackle aging challenges at molecular, individual, and population/societal levels, offering insights not only for China but also for countries worldwide facing similar demographic shifts.
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This publication is the result of a focused academic collaboration fostered by FECCS over the last few years. To lay a solid foundation and framework for this review article, FECCS sponsored the international symposium “Grand Challenges and Responses to Ageing in China and Nordic Countries and Beyond in the 21st Century”, which was held at the University of Oslo in November 2024.
Prior to this, FECCS co-organized the symposium “Aged care in context and across disciplines” in April 2023, which was actively engaged by several co-authors of this review article. An edited volume resulting from this symposium was also published in 2024 (see Sino-Nordic Aged Care).