“Beijing Dama Have Something to Say”: Group Identification and Online Collective Action among Retirees in Contemporary China

In 2016, a WeChat account called “Beijing Dama Have Something to Say” was created by a small Beijing-based company. Now widely known among retirees throughout China, this platform provides its public – mostly composed of recently retired women born between the late 1940s and the mid-1960s – with hundreds of videos where volunteer retired women speak up in the name of elderly people’s interests and spread awareness of their shared difficulties and injustices as a generation. Using ethnographic materials and video content analysis, this paper takes the “Beijing Dama” as a case study to address the development of new forms of “group consciousness” among Chinese retirees, leading them to defend their collective interests online despite China’s constraining political environment.