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GUANGZHOU, Jan. 29 (Xinhua) -- This Spring Festival, the most important holiday in the Chinese calendar, Huang Shunling gave up the chance to spend time with her family to operate a hotline for lonely retirees in the southern city of Guangzhou.
In China, elderly people who have been left to care for themselves by offspring who have left to live and work in the city are called "empty nesters."
The "inner voice of the elderly" hotline began life on Dec. 5, 2005. It was one of the first phone lines to lend the elderly a patient ear to talk to. After 11 years, the hotline has been used by more than 70,000 of the city's senior citizens.
Huang, 53, and Huang Shaoping, 64, are two of the volunteers who spent Saturday answering the hotline and calling people.
"We talk about their health, their children and stuff like banking or TV shows," Huang said, adding that the callers were often reticent to hang up.
Feng Xian, deputy secretary general of the Guangzhou Volunteers' Union, said the phone line had 22 telephone operators who were all retired and aged between 53 and 76 years old.
The volunteers were carefully selected. They should be caring, love volunteer work and able to sympathize with the lonely callers.
"Some of our volunteers were dieticians, psychologists or bank tellers before they retired," Feng said.
They have their own families but they offered to spend the first day of the Lunar New Year chatting with lonely strangers.
"Our callers may be depressed, so if we call them, they know they have not been forgotten," Huang Shunling said. "I have gained a lot by talking with them."
China has the largest elderly population in the world, with 222 million people aged 60 or above by the end of 2015, equal to 16.1 percent of the total population, according to the Ministry of Civil Affairs.
China's elderly population society is a major social issue. The number of empty-nesters is also rapidly growing as the younger generation leave their rural hometowns to seek opportunities in the city. In big cities, the problem is no less serious, but even more complicated, particularly among families with well-educated children, as their offspring often go abroad.
