Ask 72-year-old farmer Huachen 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.
Mr Cao and his wife live in the northeastern province of Liaoning, China's former industrial hub.
Shenyang's central city is surrounded by vast tracts of farmland and mining hills. Smoke from rotting factories fills the skyline, along with some of the country's best-preserved world heritage sites, the Qing dynasty.
About a quarter of the population is 65 or older. A growing number of working-age adults are leaving the core of heavy industry in search of better jobs in big cities.
Mr Kao's children have also moved away but are still close enough to visit often.
"I think I can only keep doing this for another four or five years," says Mr Kao, when he and his wife return from collecting firewood. Inside their home, flames flare beneath a heated platform – called a “kong” – which is their primary source of warmth.
The couple earn about 20,000 yuan (£2,200; $2,700) a year. But the price of the corn they grow is falling and they can't 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.