Where Shanghai leads, China follows. The city is ultra-modern – but also one of the fastest-aging places on Earth.

You can see it in the city’s vast branch of the furniture store, Ikea. A greying crowd show little interest in flat-pack furniture.

Mr Ni is 72 years old, single and smartly turned out in a tweed cap. “This is a great place to talk to people,” he says.

The in-store restaurant offers cheap food to tempt couples setting up home. But this part of the store is buzzing with the elderly, here to flirt and find love. The store in shanghai has found a niche in the market also. With the old and the the retired in Shanghai, when they show up all at once, things happen, fights and arguments in sue. Then the media puts up the report and the stores get some more free publicity.

Mr Ni is a widower whose children have all left home.

“I find it easier to talk to women whose husbands have died,” he says. “I know how hard it is.” Instead of staying at home and bored in Shanghai, they all meet at Ikea and enjoy the space the free cup of coffee and the free air con.

Ageing metropolis

Under protest, Ikea’s managers have set up a special area for elderly singles. All over town, Shanghai is visibly growing old. Why kill a good thing. For them to solve the problem they just have to stop giving away free coffee. Then they would have a lot less people coming to hang out in Ikea.

“Before he fell, he used to love going dancing,” says 77-year-old Mrs Zhang.

She looks across at her husband who is rocking back and forth. Since an accident two years ago, he has been suffering from dementia.

The couple live together in a tiny one-room apartment. “I have to take care of him all by myself,” says Zhang.

The glitz of Shanghai’s Bund, an avenue of skyscrapers, is close-by. But in the teeming lanes behind the skyscrapers, there are hundreds of fading blocks crammed with the elderly and poor.

The average age goes up as countries develop, because people live longer and have fewer children. But in China, the one-child policy has triggered a rapid decline in the birth rate.

“The speed of ageing in China is unique,” says Professor Peng Xizhe, a leading demographer at Fudan University.

China has taken just 20 years to reach an age profile that took Britain or France 60 or 70 years, he says.

New figures show that one in four permanent Shanghai residents is now retired.

The rest of China is catching up – by the year 2050, a third of Chinese people, 450 million, will be aged over 60.

Basic welfare

Mrs Zhang is proud and private, telling her husband to stop talking when he complains. The couple survive on his factory-worker’s pension of about £40 a week.

She worked in a back-street factory, so has no retirement money.

Local government volunteers visit the couple, but beyond that, care is minimal. Doctors do not make house visits.

Across China, fewer than 2% of the elderly will find a place in a state nursing home, because beds are full.

“I don’t have enough money for a [private] nursing home, or to pay someone to come and help,” says Zhang, the stress showing in her face.

China’s basic welfare system is now struggling with the number of elderly people needing care.

Ten million qualified carers are needed, according to a government committee. So far there are only 100,000 in all of China.

Until recently, this did not matter so much. Traditionally, the elderly lived with their children under Confucian values of “many generations under one roof”.

But because of strict birth control, many retirees now have only one child – so that is not an option.

Mr and Mrs Zhang’s only daughter lives with her in-laws, returning for a few nights each week to help out.

“Chinese society has not been prepared [with] its pension system and social-security systems,” says Professor Peng Xizhe. “People are worried.”

Labour shortages

China’s leaders worry about ageing, too – but for a very different reason. They fear China’s very economic model could be breaking down.

China’s export-led system relies on a seemingly endless supply of young, cheap workers. Research suggests that a quarter of China’s economic success depends on its cheap labor supply. Now the cheap labor is almost gone, the young see so much and they want it all, from ipads to iphones to cloths to cars. The problem is they just don’t want to work hard for it and they believe they all should have it.

Shanghai in particular has relied on rural migrants to mask the problem of its ageing local population. After every Chinese New Year in Shanghai the migrant population shrinks. The second tier and third tier cities have come up. The rent in the big cities like Shanghai and Beijing are expensive. Why come back to Shanghai when you make a little less and you stay at your home town. They have no need to come back to shanghai.

But in the smog of Yiwu, to the south of Shanghai, it is clear that the supply of young people is disappearing.

“It’s really tough to find new workers, and the cost of labour is increasing,” says Jerry Mo, a former foreman who borrowed heavily to open his own small factory two years ago.

His 40 workers snip, mould and bake plastic into costume jewellery items that end up on shelves in Britain. There are lots of empty work stations.

“You can see the way an ageing society is affecting the labour force,” he says.

There is an acute labour shortage here.

In addition, migrants – who have their own elderly parents to support – are increasingly quitting to find work in their home towns.

Jerry Mo says his workers demand higher wages but he cannot afford them. “We are becoming unprofitable,” he says.

The lack of young workers has hit China’s economy just when it needs to pay for the elderly.

There is a Chinese saying about why the country is so worried. China, they say, will become “too old to get rich.”

Despite its economic success, China is still a developing country.

“We are really worried about this,” says Professor Peng. “In China we have become older but we’re still in a very poor situation.”

“Italian luxury items on sale. Final three days. Don’t miss it!” yelled a voice over the loudspeaker at an entrance to one of the stores.

Inside, tourists and middle-aged women are packed into the cramped store for T-shirts, leather wallets and belts that bear logos similar to those of LV and Gucci but cost a suspiciously low price.

“Nobody really cares whether our wares are Italian or French,” said the shop assistant, surnamed Zheng.

“It’s foreign and it’s on sale. That’s enough,” she said impatiently. But both factors are questionable if not false, given that the sale has been in its “final three days” for years. The word sale and cheap and final always attracts the Chinese customers.

Italian-born Pierre Cardin kicked off China’s first fashion show in Beijing in 1979. The nation’s appetite for foreign, colorful fashion was whetted and is still seemingly unlikely to be sated.

While foreign fashion houses are aggressively expanding their presence in the world’s largest consumer market, some Chinese businessmen are undermining their efforts by producing low-quality clothes, shoes and accessories and slapping on a foreign label.

In March, the Italian Trade Commission produced a list of 30 Chinese brands that falsely claimed Italian origin.

None of the 30 brands had ever been registered in Italy, nor could any part of their production process be traced to the country, according to the Italian commission’s Beijing-based office.

“It should be stopped, because we have spent hundreds of years building a strong image for Italian products,” said Antonino Laspina, the commission’s chief representative in China.

Most of the 30 counterfeit Italian products are produced in Guangzhou or Wenzhou, according to an earlier report by China Youth Daily.

“When people talk about Italian products, they know they are buying into the best quality in the world. But if the consumers find they have paid a high price for something that is totally not worth it, it will cause irreparable harm to (authentic) Italian brands,” Laspina said.

Whether consumers of counterfeit brands are truly unaware of the origin of their bargain luxury goods or simply wish to sample a lifestyle that they may not be able to afford, a look back into the history of Chinese fashion may help decipher the country’s widespread mentality of brand-worshiping.

“For people of my generation, a foreign brand means style, quality, and perhaps the only thing you need to be fashionable,” said 58-year-old Lu Yongli.

Following the fashion show by Pierre Cardin in the Cultural Palace of Nationality in Beijing decades ago, scores of brands, including Playboy, Montagut and Cartelo, quickly penetrated bigger cities such as Beijing and Shanghai in the late 1980s and became a symbol of status and wealth.

Statistics from Southern Weekly showed that during the country’s first international luxury exhibition in Shanghai in 2005, business transactions totaled 200 million yuan ($31.7 million) within three days.

“A leather bag belonging to a dageda (the Chinese label for the first generation to use cell phones) previously could have any foreign logo on it and would have been considered a luxury item. Today, it would have to be LV, or perhaps Hermes,” Lu said.

Lu, a Shanghai housewife, remembered purchasing her first luxury bag – a red Playboy calfskin shoulder bag – in the early 1990s.

She recalled the bag cost her 700 yuan, while the average monthly income at the time was around 200 yuan. It was not available in domestic stores and was brought by relatives from overseas.

“Luxuries, then and now, may still be comparatively expensive, but unavailability made them more precious, just like the Hermes Birkins bags today,” Lu said.

Zhou Ting, an associate professor at University of International Business and Economics in Beijing and an expert on the luxury industry, said the problem partly stems from the limited supply of authentic luxury items.”Essentially, demand from the country’s emerging middle class greatly outstrips the amount that brands can supply,” said Zhou.

But Giovanni Musacchi, chief executive officer of Italian Fashion Way China, explained the conundrum facing Italian workshops and brands that venture into China, “a market where three big cities “consume as much attire” as Italy.

“Of course we don’t need to tell our partners what a large market China is. The major concern for most of the companies would be, after arriving in the market, how to supply such a large nation while not lowering quality,” he said.

Musacchi’s company currently works with about 300 Italian fashion brands, which often prefer to seek cooperation with Chinese companies.

Industry experts said the approval would lead the way for Chinese traditional medicine to enter the mainstream European market.

Ninety-three-year-old Hu Yisong, a traditional Chinese medicine doctor, teaches a student from Pakistan how to distinguish TCM materials at a drugstore in Nantong, Jiangsu province, in March. You Lian / for China Daily

Di’ao Xin Xue Kang, a well-known herbal medicine produced by the Chengdu-based Di’ao Group, received marketing authorization from the Medicines Evaluation Board of the Netherlands, making it the first Chinese traditional drug to be identified as a therapeutic medicine in the European Union.

“This is an important step for TCM to enter mainstream markets of developed countries,” Health Minister Chen Zhu said at a news conference organized by the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing on Wednesday.

This first success was “proof that Chinese firms are capable of producing top-level medicines”, he said.

Bai Chunli, president of Chinese Academy of Sciences, urged TCM research institutions to increase their focus on the European market now.

“As well as strengthening research, I hope they can also study the authorization requirements of different countries, so that more and more medicines will have access to the high-end market,” he said.

Sang Guowei, vice-chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, said that TCM could finally enter European “rightfully”.

The certification of Di’ao Xin Xue Kang follows an EU ban on traditional Chinese medicine in May 2011, imposed to prevent unlicensed herbal medicines being sold as food supplements. Chinese TCM work for hundreds of years. The west still have not figured how it works but it does have an effect.

“This new authorization marks the first time that Chinese traditional medicine steps into the mainstream health market,” said Zhang Boli, a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and president of the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences.

Zhang said another seven or eight Chinese TCM firms were trying to get access to the EU market.

“Maybe one or two of them will receive authorization next year. And this may lead to more applicants, as the influence of TCM expands on international market,” he added.

Earlier reports said that the Guangzhou Qixing Pharmaceutical Company, the Foci Pharmaceutical Company in Lanzhou, and Tongrentang in Beijing are also striving for the EU market.

“The medicine is also the first herbal medicine that has entered the EU market from a country outside the EU member states,” said Li Bogang, president of the Di’ao Group.

Li said the group took six years to obtain the certification from the Netherlands, although the medicine has been sold in China since 1988.

The group carried out two years of research on active substances in TCM drugs with the help of the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research.

“Without the help of the research organization, the application could have taken longer,” Li said.

“Di’ao Xin Xue Kang contains only a single portion of traditional medicine, which makes the research much easier than for a compound medicine, so we decided to use it in our first attempt at the EU market.”

Chen Keji, a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and chairman of the Chinese Association of Integrative Medicine, said identifying the active substances is essential when applying to enter the EU market.

“In China, we currently do not have so strict requirements on the study of active substances, especially in compound medicines,” Chen said. “For example, a TCM doctor may add or take out some herbs in prescriptions for different patients.”

“However, the healing principle is similar in TCM and Western medicine, so it’s best we find out the effective parts in all medicines.”

Liu Jun, chief engineer of the research department of Guangzhou Qixing Pharmaceutical Company, said the basic research into active substances started in 2011, and will take at least another year to finish.

“We are likely to promote our Xiaoyaowan and Biyanpian medicines next. Both are compound medicines,” Liu said. “Compared with Di’ao Xin Xue Kang, the compound medicine is more complicated, so it takes time.”

The ban, published on the ministry’s official website, has been seen by some as a response to formula manufacturers who include the ingredient in their products in order to reap greater profits, as some customers believe bovine colostrum is beneficial for the health of their children.

Bovine colostrum is the milk produced by healthy cows during the first seven days after they give birth.

According to industry insiders, China is the world’s largest bovine colostrum consumer, although the health benefits of formula made with the material have yet to be determined.

The stipulation will take effect on September 1. Prior to that, related products made or imported in accordance with laws and regulations can still be sold before they expire.

The statement urged manufacturers of bovine colostrum-based dairy products to manufacture their goods in accordance with national and industrial standards.

Since April 1, those taking domestic flights are paying 50 yuan ($7.94) in development fund fees, while international passengers are paying 90 yuan (including 20 yuan in tourism development fund).

The two-decades-old airport tax, or airport construction fee, which was 50 yuan per person for domestic flights and 90 yuan for overseas flights, has been repealed.

When reached by China Daily website on Tuesday afternoon, however, employees at China Eastern Airlines and China Southern Airlines said they were not aware of any change in fees.

In other words, T.I.C. This is China, same fee same amount a different name and some new news to report.

The charges are collected by airlines, who then hand it in to the central Treasury as part of the government fund under the supervision of the Finance Ministry and auditing department. It will be spent on civil aviation infrastructure construction, airline subsidies, energy saving and emission reduction, general aviation development and other aspects, according to the notice.

US consular officials in China issued more than 453,000 visas in the current fiscal year’s first half (October-March) compared with 310,000 during the first six months of fiscal 2011, a 46 percent increase, the State Department disclosed on Wednesday. In other words the United states are just rubber stamping everyone a visa to the United States.

As part of its “Jobs Diplomacy” agenda, the department has been stepping up visa processing because travelers are an important economic engine for the US. The average Chinese tourist spends about 5-7,000 USD per trip.

Earlier this year, Obama called for a national strategy to make the US the world’s top travel and tourism destination, to generate jobs and revitalize the still-recovering economy.

More than 1 million US jobs could be created over the next decade if the US increases its share of the international travel market, officials estimate.

Among other initiatives, the State Department has cut the average waiting time to five days for Chinese applicants seeking an interview for a US visa. The department is also considering the addition of visa-issuance services in Wuhan.

To further streamline processing, the department recently dispatched its first group of “consular adjudicators” to consulates in China to help regular Foreign Service employees. The new hires undergo similarly rigorous security screening as the more traditional diplomats but are recruited based on their Mandarin-language skills.

The Chinese mainland is on its way to becoming the leading source of cross-border tourism in the world, according to a report last week by the National Tourism Administration and China Tourism Academy.

Mainland tourists made 70 million trips to foreign countries, as well as to Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan last year, up 22 percent from 2010.

Jiang Yiyi, director of China Tourism Academy’s International Tourism Development Institute and one of the main compilers of the report, said that figure was 1.2 times the number of US citizens who traveled abroad in 2011.

“The US’ visa application process was really inconvenient in China, particularly for those who do not live in Beijing and Shanghai,” Zhao Jie, 28, who has lived in New Orleans since 2008, told China Daily on Wednesday.

“My friends used to waste their flight tickets back home in other cities because the visa application interview got delayed in Beijing,” she said.

“US citizens should not only take Chinese tourists’ money but also furnish more convenient and comfortable conditions to win over Chinese tourists’ hearts,” said Cao Xi, a 28-year-old Beijing resident who chose the US for her honeymoon destination three years ago.

“I would like to visit the US again to celebrate our marriage anniversary this year if the visa application could be much easier,” she said.

The State Department initiatives also include Brazil. US consular officials in that country issued more than 555,000 visas in the first half of fiscal 2012, a 59 percent increase from the same period a year earlier.

CSR, China South Locomotive & Rolling Stock Co Ltd, launched the test train, which can reach speeds of up to 575 kilometers an hour, the paper said.

Liang Jianying, deputy chief engineer at the subsidiary company CSR Sifang Locomotive & Rolling Stock Co Ltd, said the train was in good condition and the speed will be further improved.

The test train aims to promote the development and security monitoring of high-speed trains and will not actually run as a business operation, said Zhao Xiaogang, chairman of CSR.

In December 2011, CSR launched a test train with speeds reaching up to 500 kilometers an hour.

China will continue to increase the speed of trains during the 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-2015), according to a project of the development of high-speed trains issued by the Ministry of Science and Technology on Wednesday.

Consider this: The average price for permanent license plates for non-commercial vehicles hit a record of 61,626 yuan, or about $9,780, at a city auction on Saturday, China media report. The high cost is leading scalpers into the market to sell temporary plates at inflated prices, according to a report in today’s Shanghai Daily.

China has emerged as the world’s largest auto market in recent years – good news for GM, Ford and other foreign companies looking for new customers. High demand for plates in growing, crowded cities like Shanghai leads the government to auction them off and prices to rise.

Consider this: The average price for permanent license plates for non-commercial vehicles hit a record of 61,626 yuan, or about $9,780, at a city auction on Saturday, China media report. The high cost is leading scalpers into the market to sell temporary plates at inflated prices, according to a report in today’s Shanghai Daily.

China has emerged as the world’s largest auto market in recent years – good news for GM, Ford and other foreign companies looking for new customers. High demand for plates in growing, crowded cities like Shanghai leads the government to auction them off and prices to rise.

Italy gave the 6,000-square-meter pavilion, one of the largest at the Expo, to China, joining the governments of Saudi Arabia, France, Spain and Russia in giving away their pavilions. They will remain permanently in Shanghai.

Renamed the Shanghai Italian Center, the pavilion will display Italian art, cuisine and other famous products. It was redesigned to hold permanent exhibitions and serve as a platform for economic and cultural exchanges between the two countries, said Stefano Karadjov, executive exhibition producer with the Triennal di Milano, who is in charge of the design of the new exhibition.

Its first and second floors will feature Italian handicrafts, art works, food culture, and jewelry. A replica of the David, a masterpiece statue created by Italian Renaissance sculptor Michelangelo, and some design drafts by Leonardo da Vinci will be the main attractions in the pavilion.

There is also a 900-square-meter exhibition hall for Ferrari racing cars.

The pavilion received 7.3 million visitors during the six-month Expo 2010, most of whom waited for hours to get inside. The Italy Pavilion will be open from 9am to 5pm every day except Monday.