As people's living quality has greatly improved in recent decades in China, not only the young and the middle-aged, the retired senior citizens can enjoy happy and leisure life whenever financial condition made possible. In the well-developed cities like Hangzhou and Shanghai on east China coast, most old people are quite happy to live with their children or grandchildren, especially in helping to bring up the children of their married sons or daughters. They like to exercise Taichi boxing in the early hours of the morning, play Chinese chess in daytime and have a slow walk in parks or on the pedestrian ways in the city after supper in the evening.

The senior citizens in Hangzhou and Shanghai have developed their long-forgotten hobbies, which they liked to do but they had no time to do when they were young, or nowadays they would like to learn something new to flourish their retirement life. For these people who have contributed our society much, their hobbies are much healthier than that of younger generations. Writing traditional Chinese calligraphy, doing traditional paintings, learning to speak simple English, singing foreign language songs, dancing for leisure, surfing the Internet, and making small craftworks and so on, some of which can be done at home, others should be studied in local college for senior citizens.

There are many colleges or institutions of different sizes for local senior citizens in Hangzhou and Shanghai. The retired can study many subjects whatever the college can be available. They can also make new friends of similar ages in class and talk with teachers who may be much younger than their students. Today there is also an online university for the aged in Shanghai (上海网上老年大学). It has online classes on various subjects and interests as well as video footages on health education for them. There is also an online exhibition of a great deal of excellent photography, traditional painting and calligraphy works by old students.

Senior citizens' colleges in Hangzhou and Shanghai will periodically hold tour trips for old people's leisure, they are mostly healthy hill climbing, short itinerary and tasting Chinese tea together in countryside.

In Shanghai you will easily find that many old couples dancing accompanied by music from a portable CD player on the urban street in the sunset of the evening. Also, Western style jazz music is still quite popular here in the Oriental Paris. Shanghai Old Jazz Band Orchestra performs on the first floor of Peace Hotel at 8pm every night. The drummer is at the age of 84 ! The tenor saxophone player wears a bold-frame glasses, he looks like Paul Desmond a little bit! The jazz band plays lots of nostalgic tunes, which are old Shanghainese's favorite, such as Blue Moon, Somewhere My Love, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and some others. Of course, Paul Desmond's famous number, Take Five, is must listen. You can request your favorite tunes for 30RMB Yuan each.