Abstract

There's no doubt that China has been the world's most populous country throughout the first half of the 21st century, although it's not necessarily the oldest one. At present, with the growing internal aging population, the consequent socio-economic problems have been subjected to unprecedented concern of both government and academia and even the community. In recent years, the Chinese government has issued a range of policy opinions and intervention measures to deal with the problem of population aging. “The 13th Five-Year Plan”put forward a clear aim:we will respond to population aging, strengthen top-level design. President Xi Jinping also further stressed that, “Meeting the various needs of the huge elderly population and properly solving the social problems that an aging population brings are matters relating to the overall development of the country and welfare of the people”. In the promotion of our Party and government, the old-age business and aging industry will achieve great development and progress at an accelerating speed. To this end, it is the conscious sense of economic operation that must inhabit us all, so that we could grasp completely the changing trend of the market with a pre-market awareness and embraced the challenges with full preparations.

In the face of the increasingly prominent aging problem, there is an urgent need for us to spare no effort on the aging industry, which could effectively address the problem in a marketization operation mode under the government guidance. Nowadays, China's aging population ranks first in the world, bolstering the world's largest aging industry group. Aging industry in China, therefore, is likely to be promising, considering the market economy with Chinese characteristics. The rapidly growing aging population and its large rigid demand, along with the government's capacity to deploy captive resources, have laid a solid foundation for the development of this industry and outlined a bright prospect for the future at the same time. Hence, the thesis explores the development potential of aging industry in China and the operating mechanism of the marketization though the macroscopic policy coordination and microscopic strategic arrangements, respectively. Thus, the thesis not only enhanced the theory foundation of related researches to a certain extent, but also provided constructive suggestions for the current industrial transformation and government policy planning, which reveals both theoretical value and practical significance.

The problem of aging industry is a multi-discipline problem that involves economics, sociology, medicine, management, etc. In this thesis, we will supplement a main focus on the economic development potential of the aging industry and its marketization operation, with selective knowledge from sociology. Based on literature review and comparison analysis, we found aging industry turned out to be a rising industry in China. Nevertheless, most of the existing works remained in the phase of introducing cognitive concepts, on one hand, and development trends or foreign experience, on the other. Recent research went one step further, yet more from the perspective view of sociology and policy-making, lack of systematic economic analysis and planning. So it appears that western research tend to take aging industry as an economic exchange related issue, from which China might take the experience of product design and marketization practices for reference. In contrast, the western mode must never be copied in China, given the fact that there are huge differences between China and the west in terms of consumption patterns, social security systems, and above all, the traditional Chinese filial piety cultural background. More significantly, some of the results couldn't meet the basic conditions of China and consequently, should be treated with a manner of rational criticism.

In order to make a better understanding of the evolution and growing processes of aging industry in China, we first gave clearer explanations of the concepts of“aging”, “aged”, “empty nest”, “marketization”and“industrialization”. Then the clarification and differentiation of the relevant connotations of aging industry, pension service industry, health care industry and aging projects are also presented in different contexts. Meanwhile, the definition of“five dimensionality aging industry”, an inspiration came from the“three dimensionality industry chain”theory, was proposed, followed by a retrospective study of several representative cases. Finally, we give a logical analysis of the evolutionary process from aging projects to aging industry and the inherent agent of the formation of China-style undertakings of the aged. It is believed that the problems of“getting old before rich”, “orientation deviation”, “unbalanced development”, “inverted aging level between rural and urban population”, are nothing but exclusive in China.

In what follows, we divided the modern business patterns into three typical ones, i. e. the government-controlled pattern, free market pattern and government-led market pattern. Moreover, the main industry operation models in the western world are summarized and classified into five categories: “two compatible industries model”, “community in led and organizations afterwards model”, “reverse mortgage model”,“contraction model”and the so-called“CCRC model”. Last but not least, we explored the aging industries in different countries. The counterparts of U. S., Germany from Europe and Japan from East Asia are chosen to be studied as our“shadow”cases.

One of our primary contents is the potential analysis of aging industry in China. Accordingly, we shed light on the economic contribution of aging industry value chain and corresponding conclusions after an illustration of the current situation. Furthermore, by establishing a system dynamics model, the prediction of the market size is made in the thesis, according to which the corresponding judgements are proved to be reasonable. On the basis of a political economy analytical paradigm, the development potential of aging industry in China is investigated from the standpoint of the government, market and society as well, whose demand and supply dimension are both taken into consideration.

A mature industry cannot live without the scientific top-level design, accompanied by a well-established policy supporting system. Policy supports prove to be inseparable, especially for the aging industry, since government plays an irreplaceable role not only in providing policy and funding support, but guidance and supervision of principles and policies. The new economy relies on the information technology revolution and institutional innovation. As far as the operating mechanism of marketization is concerned, we conducted a further investigation on China's aging industry from the new cut-in point of policy demands for management, marketization strategy as well as policy arrangement required by the growth of China-style aging industry. It is worthy of paying attention to the highlighted investment and financing policies of aging industry in our research. A number of innovative suggestions for the marketization strategy are also put forward. We argue that three kinds of policies should be implemented. To be specific, they are the hierarchical service ticket subsidy policy, the differentiated industrial segmentation policy and the Internet integration policies in aging industry. Additionally, a couple of related or alternative policy recommendations are furnished in the thesis in the same time.

In fact, the development of aging industry can be probed into on both macroeconomic and microeconomic level. The former should put stress on policy making while the latter aims at figuring out detailed strategies. In the last section, a strategic research of the aging industry in China is displayed, combined with the experience of foreign countries and the previous discussions. Particularly, they are listed as follows: ① promoting the government and market transformation; ② developing the ecological aging industry; ③ prospering the financial market of the aging industry; ④ implementing the cluster exploitation of the aging industry; ⑤ leading the experimental operation of the aging industry; ⑥ allowing flexibility for private aged care businesses; ⑦ facilitating the integration of internet technology into aging industrial chains; ⑧ activating the marketization process of the technological health care industry.