On Lunar New Year’s Eve staff at the Lanzhou Fifth Retiree Rest Home in Gansu Province spent the holiday not only serving meals but quietly keeping company with a dwindling generation of veterans. In a lively activity room the sound of dumpling-making mixed with intimate conversations as younger attendants listened to stories from the war years, turning a family festival into an occasion of personal and collective remembrance.
The companionship took on particular weight when 99-year-old Korean War veteran Zheng Guoqing recounted the regret of comrades who missed reunion dinners during wartime. Staffers who helped shape the evening also acted as audience and interlocutors, their presence turning veterans’ recollections into an impromptu lesson in recent history and a conduit for transmitting revolutionary memory to a younger cohort.
One of the oldest residents, 102-year-old Zhang Wenhua, spoke of surprise and relief at not being left alone: with children absent, she had expected a muted holiday but instead found attentive care and conversation. As fireworks broke across the night sky, staff and residents alike described a palpable warmth that extended beyond physical comfort to a reaffirmation of dignity and social connection.
The event is part of a broader pattern in China in which military-run rest homes and state institutions foreground veteran welfare and “red education” — the cultivation of revolutionary memory — as both social policy and symbolic politics. The story illustrates how commemorative practice is being institutionalized: rituals, media coverage and interpersonal moments of care are combined to sustain the moral authority of an ageing revolutionary generation.
For international readers the scene underscores two related dynamics: the domestic importance Beijing places on honoring veterans as a source of legitimacy and cohesion, and the painstaking work of converting living memory into preserved narrative as survivors age. The rest-home evening was small in scale but typical in approach, marrying social welfare with narrative stewardship at a moment when China’s political culture prizes continuity with the revolutionary past.