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 the 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, the evolutionary context of China’s pension finance system was integrated and a two-dimensional analytical framework for the policy texts related to China’s pension system was constructed. By applying the qualitative analysis software NVivo, the coding analysis was conducted on 25 central policy texts concerning China’s pension finance issued since 2017.
Results/Conclusions The findings revealed 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 followed a top-down government-driven model, where the government guided the market development through robust top-level design. Moving forward, the efforts should be made to optimize the policy incentives, break down the systemic barriers, and innovate the product design, so as to promote the sound development of China’s pension finance.
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