Nearly 2,000 retired cadres staged a protest outside the Shenzhen municipal government on 24 November against unfair pension payment arrangement.

The retired cadres complained that employees in state-owned enterprises and government agencies received pension payments three times more than they did although they belonged to the same rank. They said the difference was caused due to the government's policy to reform in pension system in 1995.

To express their anger and frustration which has accumulated for 10 years, the protesting retired cadres waved banners and blocked Shennan Road, which was in front of the city government building, paralyzing the local traffic for almost five hours, according to a report of Mingpao. It is the largest demonstration staged by retired cadres in the city since Shenzhen was established in 1980s, the report said.

The protest touched the nerve of the Shenzhen Municipal Government. Deputy Mayor Liang Daoxing went to the scene and tried to calm the retired cadres, but to no avail. Several hundred police were sent there to maintain public order.

A protesting retired cadre ridiculed at the deputy mayor as saying he and many retired cadres had complained about the problem for 10 years and they would not have taken to street if Deputy Mayor Liang had been able to solve the problem simply by uttering a sentence.

Another 70-year-old retired cadre, who had been a soldier for more than 30 years, told Mingpao that he took part in the protests since he was angry about the government's unfair policy.

A retired cadre surnamed Wang who participated in the protest said he had worked for over 50 years and he came to Shenzhen in early 1980s in response to the Central Government's call to develop the special economic region. After years of hard work, he retired from a state-owned enterprise in Shenzhen more than 10 years ago. He was a senior engineer and he received a monthly pension payment of more than 1,000 yuan, which was the same as other retirees with the same rank from government agencies. However, since 1995, the Shenzhen Municipal Labour and Social Security Bureau has stopped issuing to retirees of state-owned enterprises a yearly living subsidy which was amounted to four months of the retirees' salary before their retirement, while retirees of government agencies received the living subsidies as their basic salary. The move has in fact decreased the pension payments for the retirees of state-owned enterprises for 25 per cent.

In recent years, the difference in pension payments between retirees of state-owned enterprises and government agencies has become bigger. Because the status of the cadres of state-owned enterprises was changed to management staff in the enterprises following the government's policy to reform the pension system in 1995, their pension payments were since then handled by the municipal labour and social security bureau instead of the municipal government. In another recent report from the China Securities Journal, Xiang Huaicheng, chairman of the National Council for Social Security, has recently admitted that pension funds have been "under tremendous pressure" since 1997 and the shortfall in empty accounts to cover pension payments have snowballed to 760 billion yuan and is rising every year. (For more information about the China Securities Journal's report, see our report at: Pension crisis looms as managers raid funds to pay shortfall)

Source: Mingpao (25 November 2005), China Labour Bulletin (25 November 2005)