ABSTRACT
Discourses on a changing China and its youth Television and radio station schedules, together with the pages of newspapers, have become increasingly bloated with China-related stories. Sexual promiscuity in Shanghai, the grievances of migrant workers in Guangdong, the heavy burdens of secondary school children in Anhui, the Olympic Games in Beijing, unrest in Tibet and Xinjiang, Chinese involvement in Africa and on the global stage, contaminated milk and, in tragic circumstances, the earthquake in Sichuan are but just a few of the multifarious ways in which China has appeared recently in mediated forms, feeding what seem to be insatiable appetites for the country and its people. In contrast to the past, when stories of China were typically set either against backdrops of rice paddies, misty landscapes and lakes littered with lotus flowers or, perhaps more recently, Tiananmen Square in Beijing, accounts now unfold within an altogether different set of locations, such as the Bird’s Nest Olympic Stadium; the soaring architectural hyper-modernity of the new business district in Shanghai’s Pudong; the Three Gorges Dam spanning the Yangtze River; Shanghai’s elevated neon-lit expressways; and karaoke establishments, multinational corporations, 24-hour massage parlours, department stores, Irish bars, Starbucks coffee shops, discos and clubs, Carrefour hypermarkets, gated communities and luxury hotels. Such renditions of China exist within a discourse of transformation that relentlessly applies a vocabulary of change and transition to almost every aspect of China. Even the political system, for so long perceived to have remained largely frozen (Perry and Selden 2000: 6), has become subject to such a discourse, with commentators acknowledging that in the past two decades or so the socialist regime of China has undertaken major re-orientations in its approach to social and economic development and to governance. Seen to be at the forefront of depictions of a changing China are the country’s youth, to such an extent that they are often seen to epitomize the transformations occurring around them. As Elizabeth Croll has observed:
Perhaps there has been no more potent image of change in China’s postrevolutionary years than the image of current generations of youth as they
participate in new forms of recreation and entertainment, consume in the new world of goods and enter the global ranks of the ‘young, hip and cosmopolitan’.
