On September 19, 2026, Zheng Gongcheng, a member of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress and President of the Chinese Social Security Society, discussed his thoughts on a more sustainable pension insurance system at the 7th National Pension Development Forum.

Zheng Gongcheng stated that the social pension insurance system is a public pension system supported by national credit and enforced by law, and is a public good at the national level. It is not a deferred payment of wages for workers during their employment, nor is it a policy tool used to smooth personal consumption, nor is it a free market transaction behavior. It is an important institutional arrangement for joint construction, sharing, mutual assistance, fairness, and universal benefit.

Zheng Gongcheng stated that the emphasis on joint construction and sharing is on rights and obligations or responsibilities, which cannot be simply understood by the commercial logic of "more payment, more reward". Instead, it is necessary to strengthen the awareness of combining rights and obligations; Mutual assistance emphasizes the use of collective determination to resolve individual pension risks, requiring social pooling rather than individual account accumulation; Fairness and inclusiveness emphasize the need to promote social equity.

Zheng Gongcheng believes that the goal of reforming and developing pension insurance should be to meet people's basic needs for economic security in old age, while promoting social equity and achieving sustainable development. The emphasis on basic living security is to ensure moderate (basic) protection. Insufficient pension can easily lead to elderly poverty, while excessive pension can easily result in unbearable burden; The emphasis on promoting fairness is that this system, as the most important social security system, shoulders the responsibility of promoting and maintaining social fairness with relatively equal treatment; Sustainable development emphasizes intergenerational balance of burden, rather than one generation overdrawing the welfare of the next. The pension insurance system has the characteristics of long-term accumulation, long-term payment, and rigid development, which is the most concentrated manifestation of individual social security rights and has a huge impact on people's livelihood and economic and social development. Therefore, the reform of China's pension insurance not only needs to actively and steadily move towards the goal of solving the problem of insufficient pension for some people and promoting the large gap in treatment between different groups, but also requires rational establishment and reform to ensure that the reform does not leave any sequelae.

China's social pension insurance system has developed rapidly and is moving towards fairness, but the gap between groups is relatively large. We have established a basic pension insurance system that covers the whole population in a short period of time, with 1.076 billion insured people and 340 million people receiving pension benefits. This is the greatest achievement in the reform and development of the world's social security system today. At the same time, resident pension insurance has solved the problem of the vast majority of people without pension, which is the first step towards institutional fairness. In the past 20 years, the level of pension for enterprise employees has continued to improve; the increase in resident pension has kept up with the frequency of annual adjustment of pension benefits for urban employees, and the growth rate has greatly increased compared to before. This indicates that the development of the pension insurance system has taken a step forward. The second step towards fairness.But the objective fact that needs to be emphasized is that there is a huge gap in the pension levels of the three major basic pension insurance coverage groups, and the same group has a large gap in different regions. The majority of residents' pension is not enough to guarantee their basic elderly life, and it directly affects the quality of life of a large group, thereby restricting consumption and transmitting it to the economic field, which is not conducive to the coordinated and healthy development of the entire economy and society. ”Zheng Gongcheng stated that on the road to fairness, it is necessary to accelerate the pace and increase policy support and public investment for people with low pension benefits, including farmers, especially elderly farmers, and flexible employment personnel, in order to narrow the gap with precise policies.

Zheng Gongcheng stated that addressing the four shortcomings in the field of pension insurance can better identify the direction of reform. Firstly, there is a lack of institutional publicness. Personal accounts have deprived insured individuals of the function of mutual assistance, while regional segmentation has compromised the effectiveness of the law of large numbers; Secondly, the fairness of the system is insufficient. Different payment bases mean unequal financing burdens, and inconsistent methods of calculating benefits will inevitably lead to differences in pension benefits; The third issue is insufficient adaptability to the requirements of the times. The profound impact of flexible employment, new business models, and artificial intelligence on the creation and distribution pattern of social wealth essentially requires that it cannot simply repair traditional institutional models, but needs to reshape the underlying logic of the pension insurance system, reconstruct financing mechanisms and power responsibility relationships; The fourth issue is insufficient sustainability. The deepening of population aging, the continuous growth of flexible employment groups, and the path dependence of the current system all determine that the risk of institutional sustainability is increasing. Therefore, it is necessary to take fairness, justice, and common prosperity as the goal orientation, and comprehensively accelerate the optimization of the current social pension insurance system arrangement based on key issues. In response to the current problems, gradually eliminating the privatization attribute of personal accounts and truly achieving policy unity and national coordination is the only way; At the same time, establish a public pension policy orientation of supplementing the low and supporting the weak, and narrowing the gap.

(Author Jiang Xin)