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Elderly Escape Retirement Rut
China Daily
China
January 18, 2005
Sixty-three-year-old Pan Li does not mind getting up at dawn to join her friends for ballet, despite sub-zero temperatures in a northern winter.
For the professor from the elite Tianjin University of Science and Technology, showcasing her superb dancing skills is as exciting as lecturing students about her speciality, physics.
"Ballet helps stretch my limbs," said Pan, as she dexterously and expertly tied the ribbons of her ballet shoes around her ankles.
"In fact, it's brought great changes to my temperament and way of life."
Pan registered for a ballet programme at a senior citizens' school in Tianjin's Heping District three years ago. And she has kept to it ever since.
She and her grey-headed classmates gather for practice every Thursday afternoon.
"Both my knees have undergone operations in the past, and I often tumbled," Pan said.
"I feel my legs are more muscular since taking up dancing and despite my age, I'm always full of vigour."
The amateur ballerinas' style may not be elegant in the eyes of professionals, but it is enough to enable Pan and her peers to feel a sense of accomplishment.
"They're great and diligent, too," their tutor, a veteran ballet dancer who gave only her family name, Wang.
"Come to think of it, they manage to tiptoe at the age of 50 or 60, while most career dancers would have started before 30."
In the district in the centre of Tianjin, at least 23,000 elderly people, or 37 per cent of the total, are attending special courses at senior citizens schools.
"I idled the first two years of my retirement watching TV or playing mah-jong," said a retired factory worker surnamed Li.
"All that I cared in those days was how to win back what I had lost in the previous game."
Today, Li said all her friends at the mah-jong table have joined her on the stage at a senior citizens school.
Besides ballet dancing and fashion shows, the elderly students are also urged to take up photography, piano, traditional Peking Opera, IT, painting, calligraphy and numerous other courses, said Meng Zhaozeng, vice-president of a senior citizens' school in Heping.
"It's crucial to help the elderly pick up new information and skills so as to enrich their spiritual life," said Meng.
Of China's 1.3 billion people, 134 million are above 60, making the country home to the largest group of senior citizens in the world.
Some acknowledge the situation could be even more worrisome given the fact that only children have less time to spend with their ageing parents in this fast-paced society.
Shanghai, the first city in China to report the advent of an ageing society, has opened senior citizens schools in nearly every urban community and most rural areas.
Yet, sociologists hold that there is still a lot to do as only 14 per cent of the municipality's total are enrolled at the schools.
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