ABSTRACT
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’. As in much of Asia, not only have new youth styles emerged in China but also the very notion of youth has become a signifi cant time-span between adolescence and marriage or childhood and adulthood, lasting from the late-teens to the late-twenties. Customarily childhood had ended on an early marriage when the full status of adulthood was acquired, while the stigma attached to lateor non-marriage was such that singles even in their late-twenties had little status, independence or autonomy. It was only in the twentieth century, in the decades of revolution before and after 1949, that youth acquired a new status as political activists and only in post-reform years that this age-category acquired a new socio-economic status. Now there are roughly 200 million young people in the late-teens to late-twenties age-group who are making the most of new educational and employment opportunities, are achieving independence of means and acquiring consumer aspirations to match their counterparts in much of Asia and elsewhere. The new opportunities for education, for employment and for mobility together with novel media, phone and wired facilities have generated new knowledge and aspirations among the modern young in the cities and among some in the countryside. In addition, broader contact with the ‘outside’ world, be it Western societies, Taiwan, Korea and Japan or China’s own metropolitan cities, has generated and spread new ideas about youth, youth lifestyles and aspirations that are ‘modern’ and ‘global’, purposively distinctive or at least different from those of their parents and grandparents and undreamed of by generations of revolutionary young.
