Paper short abstract:

Many Chinese urbanites who grew up during the collective era encounter their first opportunity to pursue personal fulfillment when they retire. This paper argues that China’s transformed social landscape allows retirees greater agency to cultivate new ways of growing older.

Paper long abstract:

For many in urban China, retirement presents the first opportunity in their lives to cultivate interests and pursue personal fulfillment. Those who have retired in the past two decades belong to China’s “lost generation.” They endured the political turmoil of the Cultural Revolution in their childhoods, spent their youths undergoing forced “reeducation” in rural areas, and toiled at demanding jobs to support their children in an increasingly competitive society. Despite the fact that retirement is mandated by age rather than voluntarily chosen, many of my interlocutors tell me that it offers their first taste of freedom.

This paper investigates the efforts of Chinese retirees to live meaningful lives on their own terms while contending with family obligations and a paternalistic state that seeks to extend its control from the cradle to the grave. Drawing on eighteen months of ethnographic research on the everyday lives of retired women in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, my paper examines how retirees leverage emerging expectations about self-reliance to create hobbies, join interest groups, and imagine new ways of growing old that challenge traditional expectations. I focus in particular on the popular collective dancing phenomenon, in which millions of retired women gather to dance and socialize in public areas. Ultimately, I argue that the reorganization of the relationships between the individual, the family, and the state has upended the traditional moral order. While this destabilized social landscape presents many challenges, it also allows Chinese retirees greater agency over how they want to spend their retirement years.