This book paints a picture of poor older people’s life-worlds in Beijing, China. Instead of viewing them as pitiful recipients of vulnerabilities and deprivations, this book sheds light on how poor older people exert their active agency to live through their life difficulties – i.e. how they negotiate resources within and outside of family to pursue the kind of lives they have reason to value. Based on a prolonged period of ethnographic fieldwork in Beijing, the researcher highlights the experiences, perspectives, and strategies of these people developed in the context of their economic hardships against the background of massive social reform and demographic ageing in China.