The average life expectancy in China as of 2015 is 76.34 years. (Photo : Getty Images)
Zheng Shixian, who lives in the Tongan District, was born on July 31, 1908. To this day, she is still doing heavy farm work and dislikes being sedentary.
"I still feel healthy. I would feel uncomfortable if I sat still and didn't do anything," she explained.
Her family tried to stop her from doing hard work but Zhang refused. She said she tries to do the work in secret.
Ji Shengyan, Zhang's 73-year-old son, said that his mother still harvests pumpkin and ragweed, and still helps with the laundry.
He said, "My mother can never be idle. She has worked hard her entire life. She even did farm work on her birthday."
Zhang lives with 28 relatives in her home. These relatives are children and grandchildren than span five generations.
According to Ji, his mother still enjoys watching TV shows on kung fu and war stories. She even stays up until midnight.
Revealing the secret to a long life has been a challenge to many scientists. One of those experts is Nir Barzilai at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
Barzilai and his team of researchers conducted a study of 500 Ashkenazi Jews of eastern European descent who had reached age 95 or older and were still able to live independently. He tried to find out what made them live a long life.
Many risk factors increase as a person ages, according to Geoffrey Kabat, an epidemiologist from Albert Einstein College of Medicine. The death rate from heart disease for a person who is 85 years old and above is 2,000 times greater than a person aged 15 to 24.
However, most centenarians face the same health risk as others. In Barzilai's control group, his report stated that "50 percent of the men and women were overweight or obese; 60 percent of the men and 30 percent of the women had smoked; they drank only a little alcohol daily."
Barzilai explained that the secret of centenarians is genetics. He said, "The longer you lived, the later you got your disease. And if you had kids, they got their disease later too."
