East China’s Jiangsu Province, on Friday registered a total of 6,015 centenarians by the end of 2018, local authorities said.
According to the provincial health commission, The city of Nantong had 1,321 centenarians, the most among other cities in Jiangsu, accounting for nearly 22 per cent of the total number of centenarians in the province.
Meanwhile, statistics from the commission also showed that the number of registered people aged 60 and above totaled 18.05 million, making up 23.04 per cent of Jiangsu’s overall registered population.
The number of registered people aged 65 and above recorded about 12.56 million, accounting for 16.03 per cent of the province’s total registered population.
In 2018, almost every five labour force workers had to support one elderly person in Jiangsu. This figure reflected the increasing burden of the whole society to pay for elderly care services.
According to the National Bureau of Statistics, China has witnessed a continuous rise in people’s average life expectancy over the past seven decades, from 35 years in 1949 to 77 years in 2018.
