young china TIME young china
home ALSO IN YOUNG CHINA
Young China: The Face of the Future
The generation that has grown up since the Cultural Revolution is a country- within- a- country, one that faces new possibilities, new fears—and a wide world that it will surely change

Big Numbers: The statistics that define a nation

Then and Now: A catalog of hip through the generations

Speaking Out: In an online poll, kids tell us what they like

Our Contibutors to this special issue

To Our Readers: A letter from the Editor
TIME Asia Home
Magazine Archive
Asia Buzz
Travel Watch
Web Features


nav

OCTOBER 23, 2000 VOL. 156 NO. 16

Lost Generation
China's young people have a driving ambition. But where is their road map to the future?
By TERRY MCCARTHY

Youth is about renewal, fresh ideas challenging old traditions and a yearning for the untried. Youth finds change inebriating, not intimidating.

Youth is also impetuous, unpredictable: with the promise of a better future comes a veiled threat to tear down the past. Authoritarian regimes in particular know the dangers of enraged students. Youth breaks all the rules.

Youth is colorful, irreverent, entertaining, sometimes shocking, almost always rebellious. Youth is on the vanguard of fashion, music, literature and popular culture. But the young are also the first to hurl stones, to lob bombs, to rush to the barricades.

Youth is, in a word, energy—energy that in vast China can be funneled into the excesses of Red Guards or into the excitement of an Internet start-up, into the mob that threw paintballs at the U.S. embassy in Beijing after the Belgrade bombing, or into the eager line of visa applicants who stand outside the same building now, hoping to study at Harvard or Berkeley.

For China, youth is the future, in all its mystifying, complex, exciting uncertainty. "The world is yours," Mao told a group of Chinese students in 1957. "You young people, full of vigor and vitality, are in the bloom of life, like the sun at eight or nine in the morning. Our hope is placed on you." Mao soon abused those hopes, dooming an entire generation to the destructiveness of the Cultural Revolution. But Mao is gone now, and a new generation of young Chinese is coming to terms with a new type of revolution—the revolt of the market, which has brought wealth, corruption, opportunity and confusion in equal measure to the world's most populous nation.

What will China look like in the next quarter-century? An increasingly wealthy, confident, open, responsible member of the community of nations, using its power as a stabilizing force in Asia? Or will it be a selfish, stagnating, authoritarian, xenophobic nation looking to bully its way to international respect, suppressing dissent at home by seeking enemies abroad? The current young generation will decide. Few societies in history have seen such a transformation as China experienced in the last quarter of the 20th century. Per-capita gnp nearly doubled between 1976 and 1999. The country looks nothing like the battered, colorless society that emerged from the ruins of the Cultural Revolution. An entirely new economic and social landscape has been created—and, in that period, some 630 million Chinese have been born, about half the country's total population. Life has whisked them along even more rapidly than the currents of the Yangtze River.

This is, in a sense, the first generation since "Liberation" that has had to grow up. In their parents' time, under the "iron rice bowl" system, one's work unit guaranteed a job, food and housing for life, and citizens could essentially remain in a child-like state of dependence on the government. No longer. Responsibility for housing, education, healthcare, employment and retirement has been rudely shifted onto the shoulders of individuals. Young people are having to acquire basic survival skills their parents never learned.

Accompanying this enormous change is an equally momentous loss of innocence, an awakening to the harshness of life in a free-market system. What does it mean to be happy in China today? Young people have no model to follow: all their parents taught them was to make as much money as they could, as quickly as they could. Spiritually China is a void; religion is a distant concept to most young Chinese, and they have found little with which to replace it. Contemporary Chinese works of art and literature are shot through with cynicism and a dash of despair at the all-embracing materialism they see everywhere around them.

They have few positive alternatives to offer. Chinese artists and thinkers suffer the peculiar impotence of all creative people living under an authoritarian regime—the anger at all one cannot say, and the accompanying guilt at not saying it. For much is still forbidden in China; economic change has not been accompanied by political liberalization. Today's Chinese are expected to take responsibility for their economic welfare but are still denied any right to decide how they should be ruled, or by whom.

In many ways this kind of repression hits the young hardest—partly because of youth's predilection for revolt, and partly because of the puritanical instincts kids inspire in adults everywhere. In August, in one of its periodic fits of censoriousness, the Public Security Bureau closed down all the interesting clubs in Shanghai and a good number in Beijing. No official explanation was given for the crackdown, but the authorities quietly muttered about drug use and youthful decadence getting out of hand.

But, as in the West, China's youthful energy could not be held back for long. Within a week of the closures, unofficial rave parties were being held all over Shanghai. Within a month the clubs on Maoming Road in Shanghai were open again—the goons with outsized sunglasses had gone back to chasing Falun Gong members—and Chinese kids knew they had gone one step back to go two steps forward.

Such is the erratic path of progress for youth in China today. They have an idea about what's off limits but have no map to show them where they can go, no coordinates for their ambitions. Their search for the future has not been and will not be an easy one. But it will be fascinating—and critical—for the world to watch.

Write to TIME at mail@web.timeasia.com

home ALSO IN YOUNG CHINA
Young China: The Face of the Future
The generation that has grown up since the Cultural Revolution is a country- within- a- country, one that faces new possibilities, new fears—and a wide world that it will surely change

Big Numbers: The statistics that define a nation

Then and Now: A catalog of hip through the generations

Speaking Out: In an online poll, kids tell us what they like

Our Contibutors to this special issue

To Our Readers: A letter from the Editor


Young China Home | TIME Asia Features Home
TIME Asia home


young china

  Back to the top
  © 2000 Time Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Terms under which this service is provided to you.
Read our privacy guidelines.