Abstract
China has 190.6 million people aged 65 and over in 2020, a group which accounts for 25% of the world’s total aging persons, although China’s aging population is only 13.5% of its total population, compared with 28.7% in Japan and over 18% in most European countries. In addition to its large size, China’s aging population has been increasing, and will continue to increase rapidly in the next several decades. This chapter discusses the stages of population aging in China, the spatial variation of aging population at province and county levels and among ethnic regions, as well as between urban and rural areas. This study conducts a multiple regression analysis on county-level data and reveals five key factors that affect population aging and spatial variation in China. To better understand the spatial distribution of residuals, the effects of additional factors, particularly life expectancy, are brought into the discussion to tentatively explain the spatial variation.
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Shen, X., Zhou, S., Zhang, X. (2022). China’s Population Aging and Regional Variation. In: Services for Aging Persons in China. Global Perspectives on Health Geography. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98032-0_2
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