Objective/Meaning China’s aging population presents a “getting old before getting rich” feature, highlighting the mismatch between economic development and the speed of aging. With profound changes in the population structure, the traditional single basic endowment insurance system can hardly meet the challenges sustainably, making it imperative to construct a multi-level and multi-pillar endowment insurance system.

Methods/Procedures Based on the analytical perspective of policy instruments, this study integrates the evolutionary context of China’s pension finance system and constructs a two-dimensional analytical framework for policy texts related to China’s pension system. By applying the qualitative analysis software Nvivo, it conducts coding analysis on 25 central policy texts concerning China’s pension finance issued since 2017.

Results/Conclusions The findings reveal that the government has established a composite policy instrument mix characterized by “environment-type instruments laying the foundation, supply-type instruments driving implementation, and demand-type instruments providing incentives” for the development of the third pillar. The construction of China’s third-pillar pension system follows a top-down government-driven model, where the government guides market development through robust top-level design. Moving forward, efforts should be made to optimize policy incentives, break down systemic barriers, and innovate product design, so as to promote the sound development of China’s pension finance.