Known as “Chaoyang Masses” (chaoyang qunzhong) or Westside Mamas (xicheng dama) in popular media, community volunteers are mostly retired women and men who perform street patrolling in residential neighborhoods. In recent years, community volunteers have reportedly caught drug addicts or exposed underground brothels for the police in China’s capital. The municipal government now glorifies these retirees as community heroes with intelligence-collection abilities and recruits them for various community organizing purposes. Popular media also runs programs that attribute their service to a safe and prosperous Beijing. According to official statistics, there are close to two hundred thousand of these grannies in Beijing. Many would call them grassroot governing agents for the party state, but grannies themselves speak of their service in terms of contribution and honor. Based on media representations of these grannies, my own interviews with them, and netizens online discussion, this paper explores the interplay between gender, the surveillance state, and mobilization of elderly citizens. I ask how different players, including the police department and television channels, normalize the discourse of security and public order through populist narratives of gender, race and age. This paper is based on a broader project on volunteering and urban identities in China. I hope to understand how volunteering is complexly constitutive to emerging public cultural values, gender and class subjectivities, and nationalist belongings in today’s China.