A village cadre's brilliant idea finds way into China's grand development blueprint

BEIJING -- Li Dianbo is a grassroots cadre of the Communist Party of China (CPC) working in a small village about 750 kilometers west of Beijing.

Nestled between the Yellow River and the Kubuqi desert, the village of Pugebu faces a serious aging problem. Most of the young people have gone to cities for work, leaving their aged parents behind.

In Pugebu, two-thirds of about 1,200 permanent residents are seniors. The mounting demand for senior care has pushed Li to be more creative.

He came up with the idea of "mutual-help for elderly care" -- building a mechanism to make it easier for elderly people to help each other.

It sounds like a viable approach as the left-behind have no younger members of the family to rely on and the village authority cannot handle the burden of taking care of them all.

However, there was no precedent, and Li needed policy support to turn his idea into reality.

The opportunity came in August. As the Party was drafting proposals for a new five-year development plan, the leadership pushed for reaching out to the people and incorporating brilliant ideas on the ground into the plan.

Heading the drafting group, Xi Jinping, general secretary of the CPC Central Committee, stressed combining top-level design with public opinion and encouraging people from all walks of life to put forward their suggestions.

A solicitation for comments was launched online, with state media setting up web pages for people to post their wishes and advice for the 14th Five-Year Plan. It is the first such attempt in the country's history of formulating five-year plans.

Li logged onto such a web page, and under the username "Yun Fan" he wrote down his thoughts for "mutual-help for elderly care," saying: The government builds canteens and dormitories for the rural elderly who opt for living together; those who are relatively younger and stronger can help take care of the older and weaker.

The idea caught the drafting group's attention, and the phrase "mutual-help for elderly care" was incorporated in the CPC Central Committee's proposals for formulating the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-2025) for National Economic and Social Development and the Long-Range Objectives Through the Year 2035.

Sources with the drafting group said it is a good piece of advice aimed at addressing a pressing challenge the country faces.

By the end of 2019, China had 250 million people aged 60 or above, about one-sixth of the country's total population.

With the world's largest and ever-growing aging population, China shoulders heavy responsibilities to take care of its aging society.

The "mutual-help for elderly care" was included in Article 47, namely Implement a National Strategy to Actively Cope With Population Aging. This part was singled out from the health sector as an individual entry because people are very concerned about senior care, said the sources.

Li's input was among the over 1 million comments collected during the two-week online solicitation. Internet users offered advice on social governance, environmental protection, Party building, rural vitalization, etc.

An internet user wrote: "I have never gotten a chance to enter the Zhongnanhai leadership compound. But my advice has reached there!"

Besides the online solicitation, the drafting group also received over 2,000 pieces of advice from within the Party and additional 290-plus suggestions from delegates to the CPC Central Committee plenary session last month, who voted to adopt the proposals.

"The scale of solicitation, number of participants, variety of forms were all unprecedented this time," said Han Wenxiu, an official of the Central Committee for Financial and Economic Affairs, who took part in the drafting.

Discovering that his advice played a part in the grand development blueprint, Li brimmed with joy and felt motivated.

He said plans are being made to experiment with the mutual-help model in the village to deliver real benefits to the left-behind seniors.