Abstract: The period from the “15th Five-Year Plan” to 2035 is a crucial stage for China to make substantive progress in achieving common prosperity, and it is also a transitional period from moderate aging to severe aging society. The latest trends in population aging embrace a large scale and rapid growth rate, a large base of younger older adults alongside the accelerated growth of the oldest-old population, and the simultaneous improvement in older adults’ human capital and the widening of urban-rural disparities in aging. These trends not only pose new requirements for the value connotation and indicator system of common prosperity, but also bring new challenges in terms of wealth accumulation and minimum-income protection, health gaps and multidimensional poverty risks, inter-generational equity and urban-rural and regional coordination. Simultaneously, they also present new opportunities for activating the longevity dividend and new forms of the silver economy, promoting the transformation of social structure and development mode. Guided by the concepts of active aging and healthy aging, efforts should be made to reshape the value orientation and evaluation systems for common prosperity; the foundation of universal prosperity should be consolidated by enhancing the income of the elderly population and expanding inclusive social security; the quality of comprehensive prosperity should be elevated through age-friendly public services and social environments; the momentum for shared prosperity should be stimulated via the development of elderly human resources; the pathways toward progressive prosperity should be optimized through coordinated regional governance and dynamic balanced development. With such joint efforts, a new paradigm of common prosperity featuring inter-generational harmony, full-age inclusivity, and sustained prosperity can be thus built up.

Key words: population aging, common prosperity, population development, Chinese modernization, policy optimization