CRI听力:Unification of Urban and Rural Pension System

The monthly retirement pension for government employees is about five-thousand yuan, while, for workers in state-owned-enterprises, it's about two-thousand yuan. However, the pension for farmers is as low as about 50 yuan per month.

Yan Shufen is 77 years old. She says, in her hometown of Rong county, Sichuan province, the pension a senior gets each month is very low if he or she holds rural residency.

"My Hukou or residency is in a rural area. People in my hometown like me still get 55 yuan a month for their pension now. It's very low. But if they have urban residency, the pension would be up to more than 1,000 yuan a month."

The government has pledged to establish a unified basic old-age insurance system for both rural and non-working urban residents and improve the way it is linked with the old-age insurance system for working people.

The State Council, China's cabinet, announced last month the country will build a fair, unified and standardized pension system for its rural and urban population before 2020.

The scheme, together with other social assistance and benefits, will better safeguard seniors' basic lives, according to a cabinet document that seeks to unify the current basic pension systems that have led to unequal benefits among urban and rural residents.

Under the new urban-rural resident pension scheme, residents' annually paid pension insurance, government subsidies and other contributions together form the fund pool, which will start paying pensions to residents after they reach the age of 60.

Meanwhile, residents will be required to make insurance payments for 15 years before they receive monthly pensions. They also have 12 annual insurance payment options, ranging from 100 yuan per year to two-thousand. The higher the annual insurance payment, the more money there will be in a resident's monthly pension.

The basic pension scheme seeks to provide assistance to the basic livelihood of unemployed urban and rural residents, and does not cover government staffers or registered urban workers, who receive retirement pensions that carry better benefits.

Hu Xiaoyi is the vice minister of human resources and social security.

"Migrant workers, people who often need to move between urban and rural areas, as well as their families, will benefit the most from the unification of basic urban and rural pensions."

Official data showed that China's migrant workers numbered 269 million at the end of 2013.

Government data showed that the basic rural and urban pensions for residents, together with retirement pensions for registered workers, covered 820 million people at the end of last year.

For CRI, I am Li Dong.