Following our March 2005 feature on urban provision for senior citizens, Matt Perrement reports on efforts to improve the lot of older people in rural Shaanxi.

The Centre for Strategic and International Studies predicts that 25% of China's population will be over 65 by the year 2040 (see endnote). Some older people who lack family support will need community or residential care, but this will be hard to fund given that only a quarter of the workforce has any kind of retirement pension. Moreover, as Matt Perrement discovered when he visited two retirement homes over the Spring Festival break, existing coverage is minimal; and government institutions cater only to the well-off, leaving non-profit organisations to provide for the frail and to pioneer community-based services.

Beijing Huiling, and the New Era Citizen Education Institute are working with a private law firm to propose amendments to the 1990 Law on Protection of Disabled Persons..

Nick Young meets a gang of pickpockets in Shenzhen and a Deaf American who hopes to make honest citizens of them.

Fu Shengjun grew up in a state orphanage in Hefei, the capital of Anhui Province. He has since travelled to Wales and Denmark as a representative of disabled people in China. Here he talks to China Development Brief staff writer, Tina Qian, about changes in the orphanage, where he now works, and about his new life as a disability activist.

Self-help groups for older people in rural areas will be established under the aegis of a HelpAge International project now under way in Sichuan, Shaanxi and Hunan.

In 1998 responsibility for unemployment, medical and other kinds of social insurance was unified under the new Ministry of Labour and Social Security. The reformed system has been put in place very fast; but how comprehensive is it? Are all urban citizens who qualify for benefits actually receiving them, and which social groups are most vulnerable?

Seven thousand Chinese children were adopted last year by families overseas. Some watchers of China's orphanages fear that this may distract officials from seeking local solutions to the problem of child abandonment. But international adoptions are also giving rise to a new associational phenomenon - networks of adopting parents who are determined both to respect their children's cross-cultural identity, and to channel support to their little sisters left behind. Jim Weldon reports.

'Foreigners always like it here, although Chinese people usually find it a bit informal' says Meng Weina, showing us around the somewhat ramshackle courtyard house that accommodates six young people with mental handicaps and the offices of Beijing Huiling. Two satellite homes, in Andingmen and Tian Tan, also provide round the clock care for mentally handicapped youngsters aged 12-26, in a family style setting.

Alongside the hectic pace of economic and social change over the last two decades, street children have become increasingly conspicuous in China. In the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s poor children, some homeless, became increasingly visible in urban centres, selling flowers, begging or involved in other activities. By official reckoning, there are now 150,000 street children in China (a total unchanged since the mid-1990s). About 70% are boys, and the main age range is 10-14 years.