As we approached the Workers’ Stadium the tinny beat got louder and soon the melody filled the air, a screeching Eurovision pop with Chinese characteristics.
In front of the main entrance we saw them through the evening gloom, a dozen or so women dancing in formation, arms swinging, hips shaking and feet stomping before they went into a twirl.
Known sometimes as Dancing Aunties, groups of women like this, most of them in late middle age or older, are a feature of most Chinese cities in the evenings. As we watched them, I told my friend Song that the sight of them always cheered me up.
“You wouldn’t say that if they were outside your building and you had to go to work in the morning,” he said.
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An artist in his early 30s who has never had to get up in the morning to go to work in his life, Song was nonetheless in tune with an increasingly vocal part of his generation. For them, the Dancing Aunties are just one example of a phenomenon that is suddenly the talk of China: old people behaving badly.
If the dancers are a nuisance to local residents, elderly power-walking groups can be a menace as they take up the width of a pavement or march down the middle of the road. One such walking group in the northeastern province of Liaoning hit the headlines last July when they were caught on video blocking a fire brigade vehicle and an ambulance.
The group was walking down the centre of the street when the emergency service vehicles approached but instead of moving aside, the walkers refused to give way. The ambulance and the fire brigade had no choice but to pull over while the elderly power walkers carried on down the road.
Social media was aflame, with most users condemning the power walkers’ selfishness and disregard for the hazard they were creating. Wang Shu said that the authorities should provide more safe spaces for the elderly to exercise.
“Society also needs to strengthen the publicity and education of the elderly’s awareness of rules and laws, so that everyone understands that the pursuit of personal health and happiness cannot be at the expense of public order and the rights and interests of others,” he posted on the social media site Weibo.
Staff at a KFC in Liaocheng in Shandong province complained that groups of older people would come into the restaurant during the hot weather to cool off in the air conditioning. They would occupy most of the seats during rush hour, playing cards, chatting and sleeping and not ordering any food.
“Between 7am and 9am, the first batch of advance troops come in with stools and Thermos flasks, occupying the window seats with the best views. Between noon and 2pm, the sound of playing cards and snoring become a symphony as delivery people have to tiptoe through the human maze,” one staff member told a local newspaper.
Perhaps the most controversial issue is the behaviour of some older people when young people refuse to give up their seat in the crowded subway. During the summer, a video on social media showed two elderly men on the Shanghai metro arguing with a young man who was holding a child.
An eyewitness said that the old men got into the carriage at the same time as the young man but he sat down first. The two old men then sat on top of him and refused to get up, even after a young woman offered them her seat.
I suggested to Song that young people should, as a general principle, offer their seat to someone old or infirm but he was not impressed.
“It’s not compulsory. If you want to give up your seat you can but you don’t have to. Most people who use the subway have been working hard all day and they’re tired,” he said.
Although tales of badly behaved old people are legion, there is no evidence that the problem is widespread or that it is getting worse, as opposed to being reported more. But Song had a theory.
“I think they used to be Red Guards,” he said.
The children of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s who became Mao Zedong’s so-called Red Guards attacked teachers, officials and intellectuals and destroyed temples, books and works of art.
“They didn’t go to school and they’re still proud of their ignorance. And they’re now the generation that’s causing trouble,” Song said.
Watching the Dancing Aunties step, shimmy and whirl as their old speaker blasted out another ancient pop song they were to me a picture of idle innocence. But Song had seen enough and we hurried past them, down the street and into a crowded crossroads and the busy, hardworking world he knows so little of and admires so much.
