作者：卢超
最近几则关于社保的新闻在社交网络上炸开了锅。湖北、广西、重庆等地的部分银行，陆续推出了诸如“社银贷”、“续保贷”、“渝保贷”之类的金融创新。其核心逻辑听上去十分荒诞：针对那些收入不稳定的灵活就业人员，如果手头紧交不起社保，可以向银行贷款交费；等到未来退休了，再从每月的养老金里按比例扣还本息。消息一出，舆论一片哗然，网友们苦笑着调侃这是名副其实的“借债养老”——还没开始享福，就已经把退休后的养老金提前预支交了利息。这场看似滑稽的金融操作，像一面刺眼的镜子，折射出了中国社保体系深层的制度性危机与底层焦虑。
随着零工经济和平台经济的发展，我国数以亿计的灵活就业人员、自由职业者和外卖骑手，面临着极其现实的生存困境。按照规定，职工养老保险需要累计缴费满15年才能领钱。对于体制外普通劳工而言，全额自负的缴费压力极为沉重。收入不稳定时，每个月固定的几百上千元社保费成了一座压在肩上的大山。“断缴”意味着前功尽弃，但咬牙坚持又会让眼下的生活陷入困顿。正是在这种背景下，“社保贷”粉墨登场，用“退休后再还钱”的缓兵之计，精准切中了这部分人既想保底又拿不出钱的无奈。然而，这种把“缴费压力”转化为“金融债务”的做法，无异于饮鸩止渴。
更为深刻的矛盾在于，人们不禁要问：社保基金为什么会缺钱到需要逼着底层借贷参保的地步？追根溯源，中国社保危机的核心根源在于体制设计上的严重失衡与长期积累的“养老双轨制”阵痛。
长期以来，中共推行的养老体系呈现出极度倾斜的“双轨制”特征。体制内的公务员、事业单位人员以及国企高管，在过去的几十年里几乎不用交一分钱社保，退休后却能领取占原工资80%甚至90%以上的高额养老金；而体制外占绝大多数的企业职工和农民，不仅需要承担高昂的缴费比例，退休后的替代率却低得可怜。哪怕后来出台了形式上的“并轨”政策，体制内人员依然依靠财政兜底的“职业年金”和极高的缴费基数，维持着高昂的退休待遇。人社数据显示，仅占领取养老金总人数极小比例的体制内退休人员，却分走了极其庞大的社保与财政养老支出；相比之下，数以亿计的城乡居民每月的养老金甚至仅够糊口。这种特权阶层吃大头、普通大众吃残渣的财富分配模式，造成了极其惊人的制度性亏空。
与此同时，中共过去在计划经济转型期留下的巨大“历史欠账”——没有将当年国企职工积累的资产及时划转做实养老账户，导致养老基金长期处于“用年轻人的钱养老人”的吃紧状态。随着人口老龄化浪潮以超出预期的速度席卷而来，现役劳动力人口急剧萎缩，拿钱的退休老人大幅增加，地方财政无力继续大幅度转移支付补贴亏空，社保资金池的入不敷出便成了必然现象。为了维持这个庞大且向体制内严重倾斜的资金池不至于崩盘，官方只能想方设法拉更多体制外劳动者入局“开源”，这才催生出让老百姓借钱交社保的畸形产物。
把本应由公共财政承担的保障责任，强行捆绑上商业贷款利息，实则暴露出社会安全网在面对普通大众时的严重失能与冷酷。如果一个底层劳动者连当下的社保都交不起，未来又怎么可能指望那点被扣除贷款本息后所剩无几的养老金安度晚年？
社保的本质本该是转移支付、再分配与社会风险的兜底防线，而不是抽取底层血汗去供养特权阶层的工具，更不该变成一笔带有商业利息的个人负债。面对社保危机的深水区，如果不去触碰体制内特权养老金的巨额消耗，不去真正优化财政支出结构，而是把心思放在逼老百姓贷款续保上，这场关于“老有所养”的时代大考，终究无法给公众一个交代。
编辑：黄吉洲 校对：王滨 翻译：戈冰
Loans for Social Security? Examining the Crisis in China’s Current Social Security Landscape
Author: Lu Chao
Recently, several news items regarding social security have exploded across social media. Banks in regions such as Hubei, Guangxi, and Chongqing have successively rolled out financial innovations with names like “Social Security Loan,” “Continued Coverage Loan,” and “Yu Social Security Loan.” Their core logic sounds utterly absurd: for flexible workers with unstable incomes who are tight on cash and unable to pay their social security contributions, they can borrow from banks to make these payments; once they retire in the future, the principal and interest will be deducted proportionally from their monthly pensions. As soon as the news came out, public opinion was in an uproar, with netizens bitterly poking fun at it as literally “borrowing money to pay for retirement”—before even starting to enjoy retirement, one has already spent pensions in advance to pay interest. This seemingly ludicrous financial operation is like a glaring mirror, reflecting the deep structural crisis and underlying anxiety of China’s social security system.
With the development of the gig economy and platform economy, hundreds of millions of flexible workers, freelancers, and delivery riders in China face extremely real survival dilemmas. According to regulations, employee pension insurance requires a cumulative payment period of 15 years to qualify for benefit payouts. For ordinary workers outside the system, the burden of bearing the full contribution pressure alone is exceptionally heavy. When income becomes unstable, fixed monthly social security payments of several hundred to over a thousand yuan become a heavy mountain pressing on their shoulders. “Defaulting on payments” means losing all previous progress, but gritting one’s teeth to persevere plunges immediate life into hardship. It is precisely against this backdrop that “social security loans” made their grand entrance, using the delay tactic of “repaying after retirement” to precisely target the helplessness of those who want basic security but cannot produce the cash. However, turning “contribution pressure” into “financial debt” is no different from drinking poison to quench thirst.
The deeper contradiction lies in a question people cannot help but ask: why is the social security fund so short of money that it must force those at the bottom of society into borrowing just to participate in the scheme? Tracing back to its source, the core root of China’s social security crisis lies in severe structural imbalances in system design and the long-accumulated growing pains of the “dual-track pension system.”
For a long time, the pension system promoted by the Chinese Communist Party has exhibited an extremely tilted “dual-track” characteristic. Bureaucrats, public institution staff, and state-owned enterprise executives within the system paid virtually not a single cent into social security over the past several decades, yet after retirement could receive high pensions accounting for 80% or even over 90% of their original salaries. In contrast, corporate employees and farmers outside the system, who make up the overwhelming majority, not only have to bear high contribution ratios, but their post-retirement replacement rates are pitifully low. Even after the superficial policy of “track merging” was introduced later, personnel inside the system still rely on fiscally backed “occupational annuities” and extremely high contribution bases to maintain lucrative retirement benefits. Human Resources and Social Security data shows that retired personnel within the system, who account for only a minuscule proportion of the total number of pension recipients, siphon off an extraordinarily huge share of social security and fiscal pension expenditures. By comparison, monthly pensions for hundreds of millions of urban and rural residents are barely enough for subsistence. This wealth distribution model—where the privileged class eats the lion’s share while the general public eats the scraps—has caused an astounding institutional deficit.
At the same time, the massive “historical debts” left behind by the CCP during the planned economy’s transition period—specifically failing to timely transfer and solidify pension accounts with the assets accumulated by state-owned enterprise workers of those years—have left the pension fund in a long-standing tight state of “using young people’s money to support the elderly.” As a wave of population aging sweeps in at a speed exceeding expectations, the active labor force shrinks sharply while retired elderly people receiving benefits increase drastically. Local finances are unable to continue large-scale transfer payments to subsidize the deficit, making it inevitable that the social security fund pool ends up living beyond its means. In order to keep this huge pool—heavily tilted toward those inside the system—from collapsing, officials can only rack their brains to drag more workers outside the system into the game to “expand revenue sources,” which in turn spawned the deformed product of forcing ordinary people to borrow money to pay social security.
Forcibly tying the security responsibility—which should have been borne by public finance—to commercial loan interest actually exposes the severe dysfunction and ruthlessness of the social safety net when facing the general public. If a grassroots worker cannot even afford present social security payments, how could they possibly count on that pittance of a pension left after deducting loan principal and interest to spend their twilight years in peace in the future?
The essence of social security should originally be transfer payments, redistribution, and a bottom-line defense against social risks, rather than a tool to drain the sweat and blood of those at the bottom to support a privileged class, let alone turn into a personal debt carrying commercial interest. Facing the deep-water zone of the social security crisis, if authorities do not touch the enormous consumption of privileged pensions within the system and do not genuinely optimize the structure of fiscal expenditure, but instead focus their minds on forcing ordinary people to borrow loans to maintain coverage, this major test of our era regarding “providing for the elderly” will ultimately fail to give the public an account.
Editor: Huang Jizhou Proofreader: Wang Bin Translator: Ge Bing
