Voices from the two sessions

Zhang Jianhua

, a deputy to the National People's Congress and chairman of Hiking Group in Qingdao, Shandong province

Elderly care is a "sunshine" industry. In 2013, when we started our elderly-care business, we failed to attract many seniors to our nursing home. At the time, seniors were unwilling to go to nursing homes and many people were concerned that they would be seen as unfilial if they sent their parents to one. Now, great changes have happened. Some seniors in our nursing home even refuse to go back home when their children come to pick up them to celebrate festivals. As long as you have the money, it is easy to build high-end facilities in nursing homes. However, the real problem in the sector is the shortage of professionals to serve the seniors.

Zheng Gongcheng

, an NPC deputy, social security expert and professor at Renmin University of China

Home and community-based elderly care has been listed in the 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-20) as an important way of serving the country's seniors. For the next step, it will be important to integrate all the available resources - for example, working out how to make use of empty houses and school buildings in communities. The government hasn't yet mobilized enough resources. It still needs to mobilize resources in the market and also philanthropic resources. We need to provide rural areas with more philanthropic resources.