BAMBOO BOOK: The Charm of Bamboo—100 Selected Ancient Chinese Poems on Bamboo, the first anthology of poetry praising the perennial evergreen plant, which includes a preface written by former Chinese President Jiang Zemin, debuts in January in both Chinese and English (CIPG)

Pension Coverage

China's pension system covered 484 million people at the end of 2012, according to figures revealed by the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security on February 27.

Vice Minister Hu Xiaoyi said at a national conference on social insurance funding that 304 million urban Chinese were covered by the pension system, 50.9 percent higher than the number registered in 2007.

Gross revenues for social insurance funds totaled 2.85 trillion yuan ($458 billion) and gross expenditures reached 2.21 trillion yuan ($355 billion) last year, respectively 2.63 times and 2.8 times those of five years ago.

Basic endowment insurance per capita has increased 86 percent compared with five years ago, Hu said.

Organ Donation

A trial human organ donation project has brought in 1,804 human organs since March 2010, according to a statement from the Ministry of Health and the Red Cross Society of China (RCSC).

Nineteen provinces are participating in the program, according to a statement issued at a joint press conference on February 25.

Zhao Baige, Executive Vice President of the RCSC, said that the program should be extended to all provincial-level regions before the end of the year.

Zhao said that relevant departments will build an information platform for organ donations, revise related laws, train staff, regulate donation funds and establish a sound supervision system.

China is facing a shortage of human organs for transplantation. About 300,000 patients are waiting for undergoing transplant surgery each year, but only 10,000 can receive such operation.

Aging Society

China will have 202 million elderly people in 2013, accounting for 14.8 percent of the total population, the China Research Center on Aging said on February 27.

According to a report released by the center, there were 194 million Chinese people aged 60 and over at the end of 2012, making up 14.3 percent of the country's total population in 2012. The age group added 8.91 million people last year.

The report said that a bigger proportion of the population will require aid. It estimates that 45.94 percent of the total population will need to be supported by other people in 2013, compared with 44.62 percent in 2012. The elderly with chronic diseases will exceed 100 million this year from 97 million a year earlier, it added.

In order to cope with an aging society, 3.1 billion yuan ($498 million) has been allocated to a pilot program to set up the social service system for the elderly, said the report. China has also revised relevant laws to guarantee pension insurance for people in both rural and urban areas.

Poverty Relief

The National Bureau of Statistics announced on February 22 that 2012 saw some 23.39 million rural dwellers edge above the poverty line, currently set at 2,300 yuan ($370) in annual net income per capita.

The decrease brought the total number of impoverished rural residents to 98.99 million at the end of 2012.

In 2012, however, China boosted its rural residents' average per-capita net income to 7,917 yuan ($1,272), up 10.7 percent in real terms, according to data released earlier by the bureau.