Recently, a netizen shared a video: on a street at night, an elderly woman wearing a plastic raincoat and holding an umbrella takes a short break while selling lotus flowers spread on the ground. No passersby stop, and the video has resonated with netizens.
A man uploaded a video documenting his working life, stating that he gets off work at 4:31 AM and wakes up at 5:35 AM to pack cilantro for piece-rate pay, sleeping only about an hour because he wants to support his two children and does not want his wife to work too hard. When asked by a netizen what he would do if he died, he replied that he would be liberated.
On October 29, in the parking lot of Yaju Hot Pot Duck in Bincheng District, Binzhou City, Shandong Province, a person in financial distress was seen leaning over a trash can, eating leftover noodles to satisfy their hunger. Netizens used memes such as "It's all Mbappe's fault" to mock the authorities' indifference to people's livelihoods.
A video by influencer Fengge on Bilibili showing Beijing's Majuqiao bottom-tier day laborers and their harsh living conditions quickly surpassed 3 million views, after which he was reportedly taken away by police during a livestream.
On October 26, a taxi driver posted a video on Douyin stating that he only earns a few dozen yuan after driving all day, which is not enough to support his family. He lamented, "At this moment, I hate this world," sparking heated discussion among netizens.
On October 24, a Chengdu netizen uploaded a video: a woman in her 60s wearing a reflective vest sat by a flowerbed weeding, while behind her several retired elderly people were dancing. The caption read “On one side is life, on the other side is survival,” sparking heated discussion among netizens.
On October 22, a blogger posted a video on Douyin claiming that a 73-year-old stone carving worker earns 200 yuan a day, works amid clouds of dust without wearing a dust mask, with the caption “I don’t mind that he’s old, he doesn’t mind that I pay so little,” sparking heated discussion among netizens.
Influencer "Feng Ge Wangming Tianya" filmed the living conditions of day laborers in Majuqiao, Beijing; because the content differs greatly from state media narratives, he said in a livestream that he did not dare release the full video.
On October 20, a blogger in Heilongjiang posted a video in which an elderly man recalled that during the production team era, grain deliveries to the state took up half or even more of the harvest, and that with many children at home there was never enough to eat. The video sparked discussion among netizens about the public grain system and rural pension benefits, with many recounting their experiences of grain shortages in those years and the illness and death of relatives.
Recently a netizen posted a direct message sent by a 69-year-old elderly person while job hunting, in which the elderly person claimed to be able to endure hardship and very obedient. Many people in the comments shared their own experiences of elders in their 60s being rejected when seeking jobs, sparking attention to the employment difficulties of the elderly.
A woman in Zhengzhou, who was supporting three children and a sick elderly parent, earned less than 200 yuan in 8 days of food delivery work. Facing despair that hard work could not feed her family and the survival predicament of the new era, she chose to burn charcoal. The incident involves three children aged 2, 4, and 9, and has been called by outsiders a replay of the Yang Gailan incident in Gansu ten years ago.
On October 18, a netizen posted that at 1 a.m. at a food stall, an elderly person asked for an empty mineral water bottle and then ate someone else's leftovers. The netizen offered to treat them to a meal, but the elderly person replied, "I want to eat dumplings." Since there were no dumplings at the night market, the netizen instead bought fried noodles with meat to give them.
An elderly man in Henan posted a video online to protest gas prices being too high to afford, shouting slogans such as "Down with Japanese imperialism" and "Long live the Chinese Communist Party."
According to a post by X user QuanLujun, a tragedy occurred in Gansu on October 17, 2026, in which a mother and her three children were all found dead by a neighbor. The poster noted that this happened on the same day as a similar incident in Zhengzhou, and criticized the Chinese Communist Party's grand narrative for covering up the desperate plight of people at the bottom of society.
According to a Voice of Hope report, on October 15, 2026, in a certain place in Yunnan, the owner of a fruit stall mounted on a small truck, unable to bear the pressure of life due to poor financial circumstances, dumped an entire truckload of fruit onto the road and ran it over with his truck to destroy it. The incident reflects the despair and survival plight of ordinary people at the bottom of society under the current severe economic situation.