无老化障碍：数字中国战略下的养老公平

Acknowledgments This research received funding support and research assistance from Tianjin Xiaocheng Group Co., Ltd. Thetheoretical perspectives and data analysis presented in this report are solely those of the Tsinghua Universi-ty School of Economics and Management research team. Usage Statement We welcome reproduction and dissemination by media, websites, and individuals to promote knowledgesharing. Please cite the source when reproducing or disseminating the report and preserve the integrity ofthe report. This report is intended for personal or non-commercial use only. Without written permission, itmay not be used for commercial purposes. Users who reproduce or disseminate the report shall bear fullresponsibility for their reproduction and dissemination activities and any resulting consequences. TsinghuaUniversity School of Economics and Management assumes no legal liability arising from reproduction, dis-semination, or extended interpretation of this report. Citation FENG, Runhuan and XU, Tongcan (2026), Aging Without Barriers: Equity in Aging under the Digital ChinaStrategy, Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Improving public well-being and advancing common prosperity for all are key pillars of China’s 15th Five-YearPlan framework. The plan also calls for leveraging digital and intelligent technologies to support smart elderlycare, ensure the elderly are well cared for and able to enjoy life, and strengthen the digital foundation of the sil-ver economy. Against the strategic backdrop of actively responding to population aging and building a Digital China, thisreport examines how age-tech can promote equity in aging—that is, ensuring the basic dignity, legitimate rights,and livelihood security of middle-aged and seniors across different economic conditions, geographic regions,and family circumstances. Age-tech plays a crucial role in advancing this equity. When seniors face functionalimpairments, chronic illness, living alone, cognitive decline, or difficulty using digital tools, age-tech can provideeffective support. Its core mission is to ensure that essential safety, necessary care, and access to informationare not compromised by disparities in income, location, service availability, or digital literacy. The practical starting point for addressing equity in aging in China lies in three structural pressures. First,'getting old before getting rich’ shortens the window for building public protection systems, long-term care in-frastructure, and household savings. Second, the urban-rural divide creates a spatial imbalance in aging pres-sures, service resources, and payment capacity. Third, a structural mismatch between supply and demandmeans many care needs remain locked within households, making it difficult to translate them into effective de-mand that can be purchased, delivered, and verified. Taken together, these three pressures have made agingan issue that urgently calls for coordinated responses across public institutions, industrial organizations, serviceproviders, and technology firms. In the multi-actor silver economy ecosystem—comprising public authorities, service providers, tech firms,payers, seniors, and families—age-tech creates value at every stage. A functioning product is only the startingpoint; what seniors truly need is a service process that can be arranged, delivered, and verified. The servitizationof manufacturers, technology adoption by care institutions, and platformization of home care all reflect the inte-grated development of age-tech within this ecosystem. Long-term care insurance (LTCI) is a key payment driver,enabling age-tech to enter elderly care services sustainably. Through functional assessment, service standard-ization, administration, and cost settlement, LTCI transforms household care burdens into assessable, payable,and organizable service demand. LTCI should center on payments for care services, with technology tools inte-grated commensurate with their development stage: mature tools can be embedded into existing service items;assistive devices can be included via leasing or per-use models; and innovative solutions should be pilotedwithin a well-defined scope. Experience from Japan and Germany also highlights the need to balance catalogstability with dynamic updating. Age-tech still faces four institutional bottlenecks in moving from pilots to scale. First, product classification isunclear—intelligent care devices often fall into a gray area between medical devices, elderly care tools, rehabil-itation aids, and digital systems. Second, institutional adoption lacks rule-based support: procurement, accep-tance testing, training, and maintenance have no standards for providers to follow. Third, service data standards are inconsistent, making it difficult for platform and device records to serve as evidence jointly recognized bypayers, regulators, and families. Fourth, responsibility chains are incomplete—when incide