Day 6

At the end of May, flights from Hainan island, the country’s southernmost point, to its north-eastern provinces bordering Russia are packed with pensioners. Each winter, hundreds of thousands of retired miners, doctors and industrial workers escape the Arctic chill of their homes and spend six months or so in and around sub-tropical Sanya, Hainan’s main resort town. Chinese people used to live, work, retire and die where they were born. The pensioners’ migration is changing that: it challenges both Confucian tradition (which says children must look after ageing parents) and the state’s household-registration system, which provides subsidised health care, but only where you were born. As in America, where millions of New Englanders and Midwesterners retired to balmy Florida, so in China, the lure of the beach is irresistible. And as in America, retirement is transforming what was once a poor, rural area into a new sunbelt