Employer Perceptions and Retention Willingness under China’s Delayed Retirement Reform: Evidence from a Seven-Industry Survey

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6239-825-2_35How to use a DOI?

Keywords

delayed retirement; employer attitudes; older workers; retention; China

Abstract

China started phasing in a higher statutory retirement age in January 2025. Whether that change actually reshapes the labor market turns on employers, since the new flexible rules give them the final say over which workers stay on. We surveyed 500 firms across seven industries to see how they view the reform and whom they would retain. Support is sharply divided. Forty percent of finance firms fully support the reform (95 percent CI [29.3, 50.7]); only 12 percent of manufacturing firms do (95 percent CI [6.2, 17.8]), and 35 percent there are resistant or outright opposed. Chi squared tests reject equal support rates across industries (χ² = 30.47, df = 6, p < 0.001; finance vs. manufacturing χ² = 21.76, p < 0.001, odds ratio = 5.05). Employers in education, healthcare, research, and finance put the most weight on older workers’ experience, while manufacturing and IT employers point to cost and blocked promotion. A third pattern concerns expectations: in the firms’ own estimates, 80.6 percent of their middle aged and older workers want to keep working past 60, yet firms expect only 10 to 29 percent of eligible staff to actually do so, and almost 70 percent of firms have no formal arrangement for keeping anyone on. Asked what would change their minds, employers across industries name social security contribution relief and tax incentives first, the same levers Japan has long used. The evidence points to industry specific flexibility, rather than a uniform schedule, as the part of the reform that will matter most for its labor market effects.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Cui Bin
AU  - Shirantha Heenkenda
AU  - B. W. R. Damayanthi
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/11/10
TI  - Employer Perceptions and Retention Willingness under China’s Delayed Retirement Reform: Evidence from a Seven-Industry Survey
BT  - Proceedings of the 2026 5th International Conference on Public Service, Economic Management and Sustainable Development (PESD 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 351
EP  - 363
SN  - 2352-5428
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6239-825-2_35
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6239-825-2_35
ID  - Bin2026
ER  -