Who Will Care for 400 Million Elders? China Sends In the Robots

Every industrial revolution eventually knocks on the most human of doors. At the end of 2024, China counted 310 million citizens aged 60 and over — 22 percent of its population — a figure projected to pass 400 million by 2035. Set against a reported shortage of 5.5 million care workers, the arithmetic is brutal: there will simply not be enough hands. Beijing's answer, characteristically, is industrial policy. Robots are being drafted into eldercare — and the world's largest real-world experiment in automated caregiving is now underway.

From policy paper to nursing home floor

In December 2024, the Communist Party's Central Committee and the State Council explicitly called for humanoid robots, brain-computer interfaces and AI to be developed as part of China's eldercare services. Six months later, in June 2025, the government launched a national pilot programme with unusually concrete requirements: participating companies and research institutes must run trials of at least six months, placing 200 or more robots in 200 families, or at least 20 units across 20 care communities or institutions, over a three-year window. Familiar names — Unitree, UBTech, Fourier, AgiBot — signed up.

The results are starting to show. In a Chengdu care home, a humanoid robot named "Yang Yang" reportedly wakes residents, delivers the weather and reminds them of the day's activities. In March 2026, Beijing opened what is billed as the world's first smart eldercare centre built around robots and AI devices, and state media report the sector will pass 10 billion yuan (about 1.5 billion dollars) in 2026.

What robots can — and cannot — care about

A note of realism, learned the hard way in Japan, which has subsidised care robots like the PARO therapeutic seal for two decades: machines are good at reminders, monitoring and companionship-by-conversation. They remain poor at the hard physical core of care — lifting a frail body out of bed, bathing, dressing — and weaker still at the emotional one. Chinese seniors interviewed in state media voice the same two worries heard in Osaka and Ostend alike: is it safe, and isn't it a little cold?

The honest framing is not robots replacing caregivers, but robots stretching too few caregivers further: handling the routine so humans can handle the human. With 400 million elders on the horizon, China cannot afford to be romantic about it. Neither, before long, can Europe — our demographic curves are gentler, but they point the same way. Watch this pilot closely: its findings will shape eldercare far beyond China. If the robots do end up doing the caring, it will be because we did not organise ourselves to.