HONG KONG — Large groups of older people protested in two Chinese cities this week over cuts to medical benefits, in a rare public show of dissent.
On Wednesday, a crowd of mostly older people confronted police officers near a hospital in the central city of Wuhan, according to videos posted on social media and geolocated by NBC News.
Elder care has become a growing challenge in China, where the population declined last year for the first time in decades. As the population ages, there are fewer workers to pay for the pensions and other benefits that retirees expect the state to provide.
In one video, protesters sang “The Internationale,” an anthem used by communist groups including the Communist Party of China.
Videos showed a similar protest Wednesday in the northeastern port city of Dalian, in what one hashtag describes as the “white hair movement.”
There was no sign of larger unrest of the kind that swept China late last year, when people across the nation protested strict “zero-Covid” measures that were then abruptly lifted.
While those measures minimized the country’s Covid cases and deaths for much of the pandemic, they also came at great cost to the Chinese economy.
Annual budget reports from local governments show that Chinese provinces spent at least $51.6 billion trying to stop Covid outbreaks in 2022 alone, Reuters reported. Of that, more than $10 billion was spent in Guangdong, China’s biggest provincial economy, where spending was even higher than in 2020 and 2021 as officials struggled to suppress the highly transmissible omicron variant of the virus.
The anti-Covid spending, combined with a crisis in the crucial real estate industry, is believed to have left provincial governments in financial distress and looking for ways to cut costs.
Brigitte Pu and Reuters contributed.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
