Ask 72-year-old farmer Huanchun Cao about his pension and he reacts with a throaty cackle.
He sucks on his home-rolled cigarette, narrows his brow and tilts his head – as if the very question is absurd. “No, no, we don’t have a pension,” he says looking at his wife of more than 45 years.
Mr Cao belongs to a generation that witnessed the birth of Communist China. Like his country, he has become old before he has become rich. Like many rural and migrant workers, he has no choice but to keep working and to keep earning, as he’s fallen through a weak social safety net.
A slowing economy, shrinking government benefits and a decades-long one-child policy have created a creeping demographic crisis in in Xi Jinping’s China.
The pension pot is running dry and the country is running out of time to build enough of a fund to care for the growing number of elderly.
Over the next decade, about 300 million people, who are currently aged 50 to 60, are set to leave the Chinese workforce. This is the country’s largest age group, nearly equivalent to the size of the US population.
Who will look after them? The answer depends on where you go and who you ask.
Mr Cao and his wife live in the north-eastern province of Liaoning, China’s former industrial heartland.
Vast swathes of farmland and mined hills surround the main city of Shenyang. Plumes of smoke from smelting factories fill the skyline, alongside some of the country’s best-preserved world heritage sites from the Qing dynasty.
Nearly a quarter of the population here is 65 or older. An increasing number of working-age adults are leaving the heavy industries hub in search of better jobs in bigger cities.
Mr Cao’s children have moved away too but they are still close enough to visit often.
“I think I can only keep doing this for another four or five years,” Mr Cao says, after he and his wife return from collecting wood. Inside their home, flames crackle beneath a heated platform – called a “kang” – which is their main source of warmth.
The couple make around 20,000 yuan (£2,200; $2,700) a year. But the price for the corn they grow is going down and they cannot afford to get sick.
“In five years, if I’m still physically strong, maybe I can walk by myself. But if I’m feeble and weak, then I might be confined to bed. That’s it. Over. I suppose I will become a burden for my children. They will need to look after me.”
That is not the future 55-year-old Guohui Tang wants. Her husband had an accident at a construction site and their daughter’s university education drained her savings.
So the former digger operator saw an opportunity in elderly care to fund her own old age. She opened a small care home about an hour from Shenyang.