On Chinese New Year's Eve staff at the Lanzhou Fifth Retired Cadres Rest Home in Gansu spent the holiday not merely providing services but offering sustained companionship to a group of decorated veterans. In a bustling activity room, workers made dumplings and sat with the retired soldiers, listening as 99-year-old Korean War veteran Zheng Guoqing recalled comrades who never made it home for family reunions. One of the oldest residents, 102-year-old Zhang Wenhua, told staff he had expected a lonely night without children nearby, and thanked them for turning the evening into a warm celebration. Fireworks lit the winter sky outside while the warmth inside underscored a ritual of care that blended personal attention with public memory.
The scene functions as small-scale social theatre: staff are caretakers, interlocutors and custodians of memory, enabling younger generations to access first-hand accounts of revolutionary history. The veterans’ recollections became an impromptu lesson in the Communist Party’s preferred narrative about sacrifice and national resilience, a form of “red education” that passes political memory from old soldiers to younger staff and visitors. That intergenerational exchange matters because it humanises historical narratives that are otherwise mediated through textbooks, media and state commemorations. The conversational intimacy—sharing food, memories and a holiday—gives symbolic weight to the state’s emphasis on preserving revolutionary lineage.
The episode is also useful as a lens on broader domestic trends. China has been systematically elevating veterans’ welfare in recent years, both as social policy and as a political priority; the state promotes public ceremonies and local initiatives that signal respect for those who fought in earlier conflicts. At the same time rapid urbanisation and internal migration mean many elderly citizens are geographically separated from their children, creating demand for institutional care and for rituals that replicate family intimacy. Localised acts of attention—holiday companionship, shared meals and storytelling—address emotional needs that cash transfers or one-off ceremonies cannot fully meet.
For outside observers the importance of such vignettes goes beyond charity. They illustrate how the Party-State cultivates legitimacy through symbolic care, by staging familiarity and continuity around national holidays and veteran narratives. While the rest home’s hospitality is humane on its own terms, it also plays into a wider politics of memory that helps bind older generations’ sacrifices to contemporary governance. The policy question ahead is whether these gestures will be matched by consistent improvements in pensions, medical care and institutional capacity for an ageing veteran population, or remain largely ceremonial markers of respect.