If you lay a map of China over one of Europe, and position Urumqi, capital of the northwestern region of Xinjiang, over Reykjavik, you’ll find Beijing near Vilnius and Guangzhou level with Belgrade. Harbin, famed for its ice and snow sculpture festival, will be somewhere in northern Russia’s Arkhangelsk oblast.

No doubt about it: China is huge. So big, in fact, and so diverse that it’s hard to see many unifying national characteristics. It has a population of more than 1.4 billion, made up of 56 ethnicities; a range of climates that calls for puffer jackets in the northeast and flipflops in the southwest; and an official language that only six out of ten use as their mother tongue (and find hard to understand when people from other parts of the country speak it). Even the rules of mahjong, a national obsession, differ from one region to the next.

Yet across the country, whether you’re in Kunming, Beijing, Chongqing, Shanghai, Shenzhen or Hangzhou, you’ll meet two stock characters as recognisable as Harlequin and Pulcinella in commedia dell’arte: the delivery rider and the pensioner. The two differ in every respect, starting with age. In other countries, those seeking to defuse class antagonism point to generational phenomena, but China has changed so much in recent decades that age brackets are now associated with distinct socioeconomic stages, much like the strata that record Earth’s geological history.

In fine weather, Chinese pensioners can be found in public parks and squares or by canals, strolling, singing, dancing, playing music or chatting endlessly over tea. In Europe, play areas in parks are usually reserved for children; in China they are designed for the elderly. On social media, pensioners show off their physical prowess in video clips, something rarely seen in other countries. It’s not unusual in China for pensioners to be fitter than their children.

But this January it was –5°C in Xuzhou, a city in the northwestern (…)

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(3) Yang Yan, ‘Navigating the urban obstacle course’ (in Chinese), People’s Daily, Beijing, 27 June 2025.

(4) Sun Zhen, ‘Chasing time’ (in Chinese), People’s Daily, 4 July 2025.

(5) Gonglao Collective, Involution: A Worker Inquiry Amid China’s Youth Unemployment Wave, English translation and preface by Eli Friedman, Verso, London, 2026 (forthcoming).

(6) ‘Confronting the anxiety behind “Kong Yiji literature” ’ (in Chinese), CCTV, 16 March 2023.

(8) Li Shenglan and Jiang Lihua, ‘New Forms of Labor Time Control and Illusory Freedom’ (in Chinese), Sociological Studies, no 6, 2000.

(9) See Dan Wang, Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future, Allen Lane, London, 2025.

(10) Eli Friedman in Gonglao Collective op cit.