Rural-urban migration of older people: mobility, adaptation and accessibility

Like many other countries in East Asia and elsewhere, China has a rapidly growing older population. The number of older people was 52..25 million in urban areas and 66.56 million in rural areas in 2010. The total number of the older population reached 166.58 million in 2018. Rapid demographic ageing is occurring in the context of rapid urbanisation, with the consequence of an increasing older rural-urban migrant population. In 2000, China's capital city, Beijing, had a "floating population" of 2.56 million in Beijing (China's capital city), who included 63,700 older migrants. The "floating population" covers migrants without Beijing household registration, a system introduced in the 1950s as a method to regulate rural-urban migration, and by 2010, it had increased to 7.04 million, and older migrants had increased to 238,000 (3.39% of the total migrant and 9.7% of the total old population) (National Bureau of Statistics of People's Republic of China, 2003, 2012, 2020). These changes in rural demography in both developed and developing countries are discussed in Chapter 2 in this volume. The destinations of older migrants in China are 90% of older migrants moved to the urban functional extension area and the new urban developing area, which are newly developed areas in Beijing (Yi et al., 2014).