In my X group, someone is discussing business models for retirement in China. I started chiming in… Actually, many people believe that with the growing number of Chinese seniors, the retirement care industry and the silver-economy will have huge opportunities. But this logic ignores a core problem: money doesn’t magically appear just because there are more elderly people. The issue with retirement in China is not fundamentally a business opportunity problem—it’s a wealth distribution problem. China isn’t entering an aging society naturally from a fully prosperous stage; instead, it is rapidly becoming an aging society during a “not-yet-fully-prosperous” stage, with a highly unbalanced ratio between the elderly and the young.

With the breakdown of family-based retirement support—driven by the one-child generation, urbanization, and shifts in the population structure—this model is gradually collapsing. At the same time, many elderly people do not have enough assets. Among the 60s-born cohort, some have enjoyed part of the past growth dividend, but many others have not accumulated enough. When the 70s and 80s cohorts enter old age in the future, they may become the first large group of elderly people burdened at scale by mortgage payments, education pressure, and consumption pressure. In the future, only a very small number of affluent elderly people may rely on overseas assets; a small share of better-off seniors may rely on pensions; but a large number of ordinary elderly people may have neither sufficient assets nor children capable of fully caring for them.

The core is a structural problem in society, and structural problems in society are fundamentally institutional problems. Among institutional problems, the most important is the issue of distribution. But under this kind of institutional attribute, it’s also hard to carry out truly structured adjustments to redistribution; all that can be done is to keep transferring distribution within existing stock.

That said, although many of the business models you see are, in essence, trying to find wealth spaces that can be mined, within such a structure doing business inevitably falls into a contradiction: if you do it long-term, you don’t have a guaranteed stable expectation structure—you ultimately get redistributed by higher-level forces. If you do it short-term, it’s easy to become a drain on limited resources, forced to become the “blood-sucking” capitalist in the eyes of the public. In the end, it forms a dilemma: either become a “good” poor person, or become a “bad” rich person.