Youth Economy, Crisis, and Reinvention in Twenty-First-Century China

Morning Sun in the Tiny Times

Hui Faye Xiao

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000765342
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

This book surveys the explosive youth culture in twenty-first century China, an active and powerful force catalysing cultural innovations, social changes, and collective efforts, re-inventing a pluralistic and multivalent youth (qingnian) in an age of enormous change, division and uncertainty.

Providing a comprehensive analysis of literary, cinematic, musical, televisual, and social media representations about, for and by disparate youth groups, this book seeks to offer a systematic investigation of a trans-medial and multi-locale youth culture. In so doing, it examines contributions from high school dropouts, industrial workers, migrant laborers and "leftover women", as well as best-selling writers and filmmakers, cultural entrepreneurs, queer idols and fans, and young feminist activists. Observing the Chinese youths' deployment of "small" genres, such as light novels and short videos, in addition to digital media, this book ultimately demonstrates the renewal of cultural forms and the transformative power of networked "small" atomized individuals in reinventing a youthful coalition of silenced, belittled, and marginalized groups.

A thoroughly interdisciplinary study, Youth Economy, Crisis, and Reinvention in Twenty-First-Century China will be useful to students and scholars of Chinese culture and society, as well as Literary Studies, Cultural Studies, Gender Studies and Media Studies.

1 Introduction

Youth culture in three keys

On October 18, 2017, toward the end of his long speech delivered at the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, president Xi Jinping specifically addressed the Chinese youth (qingnian):

A nation will prosper only when its young people thrive; a country will be full of hope and have a great tomorrow only when its younger generations have ideals, ability, and a strong sense of responsibility. The Chinese Dream is a dream about history, the present, and the future. It is a dream of our generation, but even more so, a dream of the younger generations. The Chinese Dream of national rejuvenation will be realized ultimately through the endeavors of young people, generation by generation. All of us in the Party should care about young people and set the stage for them to excel. To all our young people, you should have firm ideals and convictions, aim high, and have your feet firmly on the ground. You should ride the waves of your day; and in the course of realizing the Chinese Dream, fulfill your youthful dreams, and write a vivid chapter in your tireless endeavors to serve the interests of the people.¹

The opening statement, “A nation will prosper only when its young people thrive,” is a direct allusion to Liang Qichao’s novel Ode to Youth (Shaonian zhongguo shuo) written in 1900, that compares a progressive new China to its youthful generation of new citizens.

Overturning the patriarchal generational politics of Confucianism, Liang “identified conservatism . .. as symbolizing the old [laonian], while associating the future, hope, progressiveness, constant change, adventurousness, and creativeness with the young.”² Following the publication of Liang Qichao’s Ode to Youth, the dominant intellectual discourses of modernization and evolution conjured the image of New Youth as the national symbol of political activism, cultural innovation, and historical progression. Youth – qingnian or qingchun – is not so much bound by biological age limits as it is defined by a new evolutionary vision of human history and a new consciousness of time. Under the influence of evolutionary Darwinism, “‘modernity’ in China was loosely defined as a mode of consciousness of time and history as unilinear progress, moving in a continuous ‘stream’ or ‘tide’ from the past to the present.”³ As an illustration of this logic of modernity, the sublime figure of youth has been valorized to embody the reform-minded elite intellectuals’ ideal of “the ego’s active fusion with the forward tide of history.”⁴

This “Young China” consciousness has been constantly invoked by manifold waves of social movements and intellectual discourses in modern Chinese history. The 1919 May Fourth Movement – the first student movement in Chinese history – highlighted the political agency of an educated younger generation. The flagship journal of the May Fourth generation was named New Youth (Xin qingnian). In its 1915 inaugural issue, Chen Duxiu published “Call to Youth” (“Jinggao qingnian”), comparing youth to fresh, vital cells of the human body. This allusion to modern medical science and anatomical knowledge is meant to emphasize the transformative power of youth for the individual and for national new life in an organic and naturalistic manner.

In changing the youths’ inferior position in the old ritualistic patrilineage, the modern biopolitical science makes explicit the link between youths’ bodily stamina and their political momentum as an essential means to create a new and empowered modern subject. Naturally, the bildungsroman was introduced as a staple literary genre to depict the development of a “young China” as a journey and a rite of passage, the end destination of which is the maturation of the youthful body of China’s future citizens and the rise of a modern nation-state in place of a crumbling old empire. In other words, youth or qingnian in modern China has never simply been a category of biological age or a transitional stage of human development, but rather a politically and aesthetically sublimated figure “that embodies an array of lofty ideals: newness, progress, and above all, the vision of national rejuvenation.”⁵

During the Maoist era of 1949 to 1976, political campaigns about creating the socialist “New Man,” “Iron Girl,” and “Red Guard” continued this biopolitical tradition of producing a forward-looking youth endowed with revolutionary idealism, heroic collectivism, and labor aesthetics inscribed on a politically charged and energized young body. In 1957, Mao Zedong declared: “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. . .. The world belongs to you. China’s future belongs to you.”⁶ With this comparison to the brightness of the morning sun, youths are entrusted with the great task of building China’s future with their explosive energy and refreshing vitality of new life. The quick and wide mobilization of Red Guards at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution appears to manifest this vision of youth’s earth-shattering momentum and burning revolutionary passion. In his study of socialist literature and art, Cai Xiang contends that revolution is not only disruptive, but also productive. It subverts the Confucianist inter-generational hierarchy and produces the historical figure of youth as the socialist “new man,” who simultaneously embodies both a futuristic telos of the revolution and a rebellious anti-establishment force.⁷ Countless socialist literary and cinematic works continue to employ the form and logic of bildungsroman to construct a politicized subjectivity that “denotes youth as a sociological group but at the same time also symbolizes the revolution and the state.”⁸

The latest Party-prescribed bildungsroman, as quoted at the beginning of this chapter, similarly predicates national rejuvenation on the revival of such a future-oriented discourse of youth while, more significantly, dismissing the political agency and subversive potential of that same social group. Youth have been regarded not only as a unified driving force behind the development of the national economy and the China Dream (Zhongguo meng) discourse, but also an important historical agent and ideological link between the past and the future, and between nationalist and collectivist discourse and the construction of an individual subject in the market logic of competition and self-betterment. While displaying an acute awareness of youth’s ever more important role as human capital that plays a key role in pushing forward sustainable economic development and the steady growth of national power, Xi’s speech, however, fails to recognize the ongoing social differentiation and segmentation that drive today’s youths into another historical maelstrom of unprecedented changes, escalating risks, contingencies, jeopardies, and struggles.

Four decades after China’s economic reform and reintegration within the global capitalist system, it has become clear that the lives of the youth – their aspirations and apprehensions, socio-economic statuses, signifying systems, and cultural imaginaries – have been conditioned by age, class, ethnicity, and gender-specific socio-economic variables. The “morning sun” metaphor associating youth with revolutionary change and futurity has disappeared from the latest diverging trends of Chinese youth culture. A unified historical and politicized understanding of youth embedded in the national and the collective ethos, as indicated by a common denominator like qingnian, is a hollow concept in the twenty-first century. Rather, the phrase “Tiny Times,” the title of a young writer’s best-selling novel and film series, is frequently cited to illustrate the disintegration of that grand narrative and the new predominance of the “small” – ephemeral pleasures, trivial motives, micro-narratives on the smaller screen and portable media, and atomic individualization – in contemporary China.

The historical process of social fragmentation and dispersion has led to the coinage of plenty of neologisms to name different groups of Chinese youth along age, gender, region, and class divisions: 80 hou (“post-’80s generation”), 90 hou (“post-’90s generation”), shengnü (“leftover women”), xiaozhen qingnian (“small-town youth”), fo xi qingnian (“Zen-style youth”), fu erdai (“second-generation descendents of the rich”), yizu (“ant tribe”), diaosi (“losers, underdogs”), and many more. The proliferation of neologisms for various youth groups speaks volumes about the ongoing social stratification and identity fragmentation in a post-socialist China. A careful study of several vignettes will reveal the changing

Vignette I: The new millennium has seen China rise to the status of “Huallywood” with its numerous indigenous blockbusters churned out for the world’s second largest film market (after the United States). In the past few years, the Chinese film industry has seen a series of record-breaking box office miracles. According to the statistics published by the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television (SAPPRFT), the total box office revenue in 2017 reached 55.91 billion yuan, a 13.45 percent increase over 2016. Domestic film productions generated over 30 billion yuan, taking 53.84 percent of the total box office revenue.⁹

trends and wide spectrum of today’s pluralistic and multi-faceted youth culture, movements, and life politics.

What is particularly worth noting is that summer blockbusters with young students as target audiences have played an important role in the ongoing box office boom. Instead of Hollywood-style big-budget blockbusters (dapian), the phenomenal success of Love Is Not Blind (Shilian 33 tian, 2011), the Tiny Times series (Xiao shidai, 2013–2015), and various other small-budget youth-oriented productions (qingchun pian) testifies to a radically changing film market in contemporary China. Catering to an increasingly younger Chinese audience whose average age was twenty-one in 2012, many of these summer blockbusters have been adapted from bestselling youth novels, online publications, and imported and indigenous comic books. Thanks to a changing Chinese film market, production model, and audience demographics, the youth film has replaced the “Happy New Year film” (hesui pian) to become the most lucrative genre that drives up the Chinese box office revenue to historic highs.¹⁰ In 2015, multiple youth films, including the last installment of Tiny Times, were released during summer break. As a result, the monthly box office revenue of July surpassed the annual total of 2014.

Film critics attribute these phenomenal box office takes to the accelerated expansion of chain cinemas from big cities to small towns. Hence, “small-town youth” (xiaozhen qingnian), a term that is often interchangeable with “provincial youth” (waisheng qingnian), are reported to have become the driving force behind the explosive growth of the Chinese film industry in particular and media culture in general.¹¹ Both terms refer to those between eighteen and thirty-five years old who have grown up outside of the megacities like Beijing or Shanghai but yearn to experience a more cosmopolitan lifestyle either by relocating to the more developed regions or through taking in audio-visual experiences of various media products. Their rising purchase power and growing demand for cultural products are targeted by an increasingly diversifying and comprehensive market that is posed to expand and penetrate into every remote corner of contemporary Chinese society. Embodying an unprecedented mobility with their geographic movement and cultural fluidity brought about by the speed of new public transportation and digital media, this group of provincial youths is touted as the most influential group of consumers of 2018, feeding the next growth point of China’s new creative economy.¹²

It is not only young consumers of film, but also younger generations of filmmakers who have played increasingly important roles in the Chinese film industry. A cohort of directors including Guo Jingming, Han Han, Chen Sicheng, Wang Ran, Han Yan, Guo Fan, MTJJ (Zhang Ping), Jiaozi (Yang Yu) and Dong Chengpeng were born and raised after China’s economic liberalization and marketization. Eschewing the Fifth Generation’s self-ethnographic style or the Sixth Generation’s gritty realism, these younger filmmakers blend together formalistic innovation with unabashed commercial pursuit ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: youth culture in three keys
• 2 Youth economy in the "China Dream": rise of the Me-generation creative class
• 3 Against the proletarian modernity: retrotopic journey and precariat subject in alternative youth literature
• 4 Back to youth on the wings of music: prosthetic memories and sonic nostalgia for an unlived past
• 5 "We are creating a spokesperson for ourselves": queering and un-queering young idols on networked small screens
• 6 Political economy of small: cross-cultural and transmedial shojo manga (girls' comics) aesthetics
• Conclusion: reinventing the discourse of hope in an age of crisis
• Index