ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the role of youth in the field of cultural production in rural Shaanbei, North-central China, based primarily on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the mid and late 1990s (with some updates based on more recent fieldwork in the mid-2010s). It looks at the different ways and sites in which Shaanbei rural youth participate actively in cultural production. The chapter asks: What are the most salient media through which young people in Shaanbei express themselves and assert their identities? What roles do different social institutions (e.g., temples, schools, villages, households), modern technologies (e.g., video compact discs), translocal/transnational mass media (e.g., satellite and cable TV), and spaces (e.g., home and courtyard, village, temple ground, roads, market, Internet cafes) play in enabling youth expressivity? How is youthful energy mobilized and how do rural youth capture different resources to assert their presence as cultural beings and producers? Rural Shaanbei youth do not have to choose between, on the one hand, singing karaoke songs and playing online video games (supposedly “modern”) and, on the other, playing finger-guessing drinking games (supposedly “traditional”), or between institutionally organized mass youth activities and self-initiated, small-group activities; each enables youth expressivity and the assertion of their identities.
