Governing aging through learning: later-life education policy in China, 1982–2025

As population aging accelerates, later-life education has become an increasingly visible policy response across aging societies. However, it is still more often understood as a welfare service or participatory good than as a political technology through which aging is governed. Drawing on Foucauldian discourse analysis, this article examines how national later-life education policy in China from 1982 to 2025 renders later life governable through learning. The analysis shows, first, that later-life education has developed from a selective arrangement for retired veteran cadres into a dispersed governance technology embedded in aging strategy, community infrastructures and society-wide aging education. Second, education is justified through the problematization of aging as a developmental pressure, a burden on elderly care systems and a risk to social stability. Third, these governing technologies are translated into five educational tracks: health, vocational, digital, volunteer and ideological education, through which policy promotes a desirable older subject who is independent, responsible, adaptable and politically aligned. While policy expands learning participation, it simultaneously recodes structural inequalities as individual deficits, rendering some older adults less visible and less supportable within the policy field.