ABSTRACT
People may develop distinctive generational characteristics due to rapid social change as well as through traumatic historical events (Edmunds and Turner, 2002; Mannheim, 1952/1923). Present-day Chinese youth (using the broader defi nition of youth mentioned in the Introduction) represent China’s fi rst generation whose lives have from the very beginning been accompanied by the country’s reform and opening up with no lived experience of Maoist socialism. Thus, their identity construction is being played out in a dramatically different socio-cultural context compared with the previous generations of Chinese youth. In addition, as already mentioned, due to the one-child policy instituted in 1979, nearly all of urban children and youth are only-children. A range of expressions have been used to highlight the impacts of the dramatic social transformation upon Chinese urban youth, such as ‘the newer, new humanities’ (xin xin renlei), ‘China’s millennials’, ‘China’s me-generation’, ‘China’s generation Y’, ‘China’s Internet generation’ (alternatively, ‘China’s e-generation’ or ‘wired generation’), the ‘post-80s generation’, ‘little emperors/empresses’ and ‘the new radicals’.
