This book paints a picture of poor older people's life-worlds in Beijing China. Instead of
viewing them as pitiful recipients of vulnerabilities and deprivations this book sheds light
on how poor older people exert their active agency to live through their life difficulties -
i.e. how they negotiate resources within and outside of family to pursue the kind of lives they
have reason to value. Based on a prolonged period of ethnographic fieldwork in Beijing the
researcher highlights the experiences perspectives and strategies of these people developed
in the context of their economic hardships against the background of massive social reform and
demographic ageing in China.
