In an online survey covering 6,919 people, 81.8 percent of the respondents said they had to save money for retirement because they had little confidence in the pension system, the China Youth Daily said.

According to the survey conducted last week, 76 percent cited high medical costs as the factor forcing them to save, the newspaper reported.

By the end of September, China's pension system covered 215 million people in cities and 51.7 million in the rural area.

The rest of the 1.3 billion population either have no pension coverage at all or receive a reduced salary after retirement from their employers, which mostly are state-owned enterprises.

Official data show that China's household savings have exceeded 20 trillion yuan (2.9 trillion dollars), with new deposits reaching 3.3 trillion yuan in the first nine months of this year.

Beijing is increasingly banking on domestic demand to maintain its hectic economic growth, especially at a time when exports are slowing down amid the ongoing international financial crisis.

Premier Wen Jiabao recently said the government would seek to reform income distribution to "ease and remove the worries that had prevented residents from consuming more."

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