Modernization as Lived Experiences

Three Generations of Young Men and Women in China

Fengshu Liu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138217201
• eBook ISBN: 9781315441221
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

This book examines, in a culturally and contextually sensitive way, the particularity of what it means to be young in post-Mao China undergoing rapid and dramatic transformation by comparing childhood and youth experiences over three generations.

The analysis draws on life-history interviews with Beijing young men and women in their last upper secondary year, their parents and their grandparents. The book offers a comprehensive coverage of the various aspects of life pertinent to youth experiences and compares each of these across three generations, treating them as interrelated and mutually affecting processes – childhood, intergenerational relationships, education and future plans, gender and sexuality. By offering both men's and women's accounts of their childhood and youth experiences, which for the three generations combined extend over nearly a century, the book sheds useful light on how gender and sexuality have evolved in China. Fengshu Liu concludes that the young generation's lives feature a 'maximization desire', in sharp contrast to the two older generations' childhood and youth experiences.

The book meticulously weaves rich ethnographic details and individual life stories into a larger and unfolding picture of historical, social and cultural trends, while providing critical insight into Chinese modernization and modernity against the backdrop of globalization. It can thus be an enjoyable read also for people beyond the academia interested in China's social and cultural transformation and its children and youth.

Chapter 1

Introduction

‘What a life today’s young people are living! The difference from my days is like the difference between heaven and earth (tiandi zhibie).’ This is a frequently uttered social commentary by my own 87-year-old mother. She also says that she is lucky to have lived long enough to see today’s society but regrets that her childhood and youth¹ were during the 1930s–1950s rather than now. At the same time, she sometimes laments about today’s society and young people. Underlying her ambivalence about the condition of children and youth in contemporary China is a strong perception of dramatic change since she was young. I have often heard the same from other people during my conversations with my relatives and friends in China and from online or offline acquaintances. My mother’s generation – who has seen China’s transformation over nearly a century – is not the only one with a vivid perception of dramatic change, however. Talk about dramatic change by comparing today’s young people with one’s own childhood and youth is indeed common also among younger people, especially those who grew up before the mid-1990s, and even among people born in the 1980s. These younger age groups also tend to show both appreciation and complaints about the dramatic social change, albeit in ways not totally identical to how my mother’s generation does it. These lay people’s commentaries about social change touch on all the aspects of life such as parenting, childhood, generational relationship, schooling, gender and sexuality, incorporating both the material and non-material transformation of life.

What is it like to be young in present-day Chinese society, referred to as post-Mao, or post-socialist, China? How has ‘being young’ changed in China over the recent generations? How have young people’s experiences been transformed regarding such aspects of life as childhood, education and future plans, family relationships, gender and sexuality? Although the predominant discourse is about change, what social and cultural continuities can be found from generation to generation? What can the generational differences and similarities tell us about the nature of China’s recent transformation?

These questions will be best answered by listening to and comparing what people in the various generations tell us about their own lives. A generational comparative approach can be a useful way to capture the particularity of being young in the present by comparing it with the past. This book reports findings from life history interviews with three generations of Chinese men and women about their childhood and youth experiences.

A voluminous literature now exists on post-Mao China’s transformation. Most scholarly publications analyze it from macro – and often economic and political science – perspectives, as reflected in concepts such as ‘the Chinese experience’, ‘the Chinese path’, ‘the Chinese model’ and ‘the Chinese miracle’. Many studies quantify economic, technological and material growths and their socioeconomic consequences. A number of books also look at the living of the transformation from a micro perspective using qualitative research methods on various topics such as family relations (e.g., Evans, 2008; Gonçalo, Santos and Harrell, 2017), childhood (e.g., Naftali, 2016), gender (e.g., Choi and Peng, 2016; Fincher, 2014; Song and Hird, 2014; Jacka, 2006; Wang, 2017), sexuality (e.g., Farrer, 2002), youth culture (e.g., de Kloet and Fung, 2017), education (e.g., Kipnis, 2011), rural-urban migration (e.g., Zhang, 2002), young people and the Internet (Liu, 2011) and modernity and individual psyche (Kipnis, 2012). These qualitative studies usefully counterbalance and complement the studies from a macro perspective. Much can be learned about people’s lives and about historical trends by examining actual personal lived experiences.

This study purports to extend this latter body of research by focusing on urban young men’s and women’s lived experiences of post-Mao China’s modernization. It transcends the foci and approaches of previous research on contemporary Chinese youth and gender studies in three main ways. First, it takes a generational comparative approach. ‘Generation’ is an in-vogue term widely adopted in the media and academia to portray contemporary children and youth. However, generation is a contested term. Its definition may vary by ethnicity, geography, culture and time. There is relatively little consensus about the span of years to be used in defining a generation. There is also dispute as to whether generational differences exist that are significant enough to take into consideration in various contexts such as the workplace and higher education. My choice of a generational comparative perspective in this study is based on its particular usefulness for understanding social change, which may prove especially relevant to societies such as post-Mao China. Mannheim (1952) argues, for a group of contemporaries to form an ‘actual’ generation, they must share a set of experiences and social and economic conditions during their formative years. These shared experiences and conditions shape their generationally distinctive consciousness and mentality, pointing to their distinctive ‘generational locations’, each with ‘certain definite modes of behavior, feeling and thought’ (p. 291). The more rapid and dramatic such changes are, the greater the differences will be between generations. The generational differences and similarities that may emerge from generational comparisons may in turn help us assess the momentum, scope, nature and significance of social change. Greenfield (2009) argues:

Generation comparisons are effective means to understand social change. The effects of social change can be studied by comparing generations at the same stage of life but at different historical periods (i.e., at different time points). One can also compare different generations at the same time. In both designs, intergenerational difference is the variable of interest. When the latter design involves parents and children in the same family, intergenerational conflict can be used to index intergenerational change.

(pp. 406–7)

I would add that generational comparisons also make it possible to document social and cultural continuity from generation to generation. In academic discussion of post-Mao China’s transformation, much focus has been on the dramatic change, but much less on continuity in terms of cultural values and social reproduction. It remains a question how both contemporary change and continuity are reflected in young people’s self-understanding, interpersonal relations and identity construction in general. Studying family generations will not only show intergenerational conflict, as Greenfield usefully argues, but it will also – from the perspectives of both children and parents – show how meanings, including intergenerational identification and relationship, familism, attachment and intimacy, are co-constructed by the various generations to affect young people (and their parents and grandparents) (Brannen, 2004). This view agrees with the notion of ‘linked lives’: people in salient relationships with each other, such as parents and children, exert long-lasting mutual influence (Elder, Johnson and Crosnoe, 2003).

This book compares generations at the same stage of life (childhood and youth) but at different historical times, drawing on life history interviews with three generations of family members whose formative years were in sharply different historical circumstances. Thus, these family generations also constitute three sociological generations in the Mannheimian sense.

Notwithstanding the widespread interest internationally (e.g., among politicians, advertisers, employers and academics) in understanding post-Mao China’s transformation and its young people, few comparative studies of recent Chinese generations exist. Few previous studies have drawn on a combination of interviews with present-day youth and retrospective interviews with their own parents and grandparents about what life was like when they were young. Yan’s book (2003) Private Life under Socialism is not an explicit cross-generational comparison of youth but an anthropological study of the transformation of private life in rural China from 1949 to 1999. Generational change in values and gender is a strong theme in the book. But its young generation was rural youth born much earlier than the urban young generation in this present book. Evans’s (2008) book The Subject of Gender adopts a generational comparative perspective. But it focuses specifically on changing mother-daughter relations over two generations. Clark’s (2012) Youth Culture in China: From Red Guards to Netizens compares youth culture in 1968, 1988 and 2008, drawing on academic studies, films and photographs. It adopts an explicitly generational comparative approach. However, its focus and methodological approach differ substantially from the present study.

The present work also purports in one study to offer a more comprehensive coverage of the various aspects of life pertinent to youth experiences, such as childhood, intergenerational relationships, education and future plans, gender and sexuality, as interrelated and mutually affecting processes and as components of the totality of life. Previous publications concerning these respective aspects of young people’s life exist and are useful for the analysis in this book. There are also a small number of books on Chinese urban youth (e.g. Cockain, 2012 and a previous book of my own, Liu, 2011), but these have other thematic foci, methodological designs and approaches and concern other age groups than the present study. Few studies so far have adopted a holistic approach to examine the different aspects of youth’s life as parts of an integrated whole.

This book also combines a generational perspective with a gender perspective. Gender as a primary cultural frame for behavior and social relations offers a vantage point to examine social change concomitant to modernization and globalization. No previous book covers both men and women in China across three generations with regard to any of the themes dealt with in the present book’s empirical chapters. This book examines present-day young people’s gender conceptions and practices by including both women and men, treating gender from a relational perspective, and by comparing them with their parents and grandparents. By offering both men’s and women’s accounts of their childhood and youth experiences, which for the three generations combined extend over nearly a century, this study will shed light on how gender (including sexuality) has evolved in China.

The one-child policy practiced in cities (until 2016) unintentionally created a child-centeredness in urban families with parents’ strong interest in investing in the only child’s education and high achievement expectations regardless of the sex of the child (Croll, 2006; Fong, 2004; Liu, 2006; Rich and Tsui, 2002). This contrasts to traditional ‘son favoritism’, suggesting that gender may have become less, or even no longer, influential for urban youth, in accord with Parish and Willis’ (1995) argument that educational expansion promotes gender equity. Previous research on Chinese only children has predominantly been quantitative and focused on parenting, consumption, and only children’s psychological development. The research literature usually only points to the one-child policy’s unintended promotion of the girl child’s education and family status, with scant attention to other factors that may also affect young people’s negotiation of femininities and masculinities, such as individualization, the post-Mao ‘natural sex differences’ discourse, the filial duty expected of the only child, and the notoriously imbalanced sex ratio. An important question this book will explore is: how do young men and women from the only child generation negotiate gender in the more general post-Mao circumstances?

In short, this book seeks to understand, from the informants’ own perspective, being young at different points of time in history to shed light on social and cultural transformation and to illuminate the relationship between the logic of individuals’ innovative actions and the effects of system-level constraints and normative settings. Life history as a research method is well suited for such a purpose. Goodson (1995) defines life history as ‘stories of action within theories of contexts’ (p. 98). A life history informed study, such as the present one, emphasizes the importance of making connections between individual life stories and wider frameworks of understanding (Cole and Knowles, 2001; Goodson and Sikes, 2001).

In this study, this means interpreting the findings, and making theoretical sense of them, by situating my informants’ life stories in the larger historical context pertinent to each generation’s childhood and youth. I shall accordingly view the experiences of the young generation – the starting point and main focus of this book, against post-Mao China’s rearticulated and revised modernization project. In doing so, I will draw on insight from critically examined concepts of ‘modernization’ and ‘modernity’. Since the changes in post-Mao China have been much influenced by global modernizing forces, there is much similarity to the transformation that has occurred in the West.² However, China’s post-Mao modernization is unfolding in a national-local context with its own historical, cultural, social, economic and political particularities that interact with global forces to reconfigure China’s modernization into a unique experience. ‘Chineseness’ is also consciously sought in the state modernization discourse, as reflected in the notion of ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ (Zhang, 2004), which represents a particularly Chinese ‘dual’ approach to modernity (Liu, 2011). Such a perspective on modernization, which is in keeping with the ‘divergence’ thesis (see Chapter 2), is not to simplistically pose the ‘local’ and ‘global’, or ‘Chinese’ and ‘Western’ (or the rest of the world) as bifurcated entities or a dichotomy, but to recognize the complexity inherent in post-Mao modernization in which young people’s lives are embedded.

The contemporary Chinese model of modernization (Liu, 2011; Zhang, 2004), like any other version of modernization, not only involves profound material and institutional transformation, but it also constitutes a powerful cultural model with specific expectations, ideals, enjoinments and demands for people. It addresses individuals as certain sorts of human beings, for example, as child to parents, as man or woman and as student across a range of social sites, such as the family, the educational institutions, the labor market and the workplace. Individual reflexivity has to be exercised within, not above, both the material and ideational contexts, which together constitute the ‘structural condition’ for individual agency (Sewell, 1992).

In this book, adopting such a perspective on modernization, I hope to understand how Chinese urban youth exercise agency while coming to terms with both the institutional and material conditions and cultural norms and ideals concomitant to post-Mao social transformation, and how in so doing they mark themselves as members of a particular generation, remarkably different from their parents and grandparents, and as gendered beings.

Data and methods

This study is part of a larger project on three generations of young men and women in China and Norway (2011–16). The data used in this book are 98 life history interviews conducted in 2011–12 with three generations of men and women. The young interviewees were 46 students – 25 boys and 21 girls, in their final year of upper secondary school in Beijing. These initial interviews were followed by interviews with 14 girls’ mothers (N = 14) and maternal grandmothers (N = 14) and with 12 boys’ fathers (N = 12) and paternal grandfathers (N = 12). Whenever necessary for the sake of clarity, the three generations are hereafter referred to respectively as the young generation, the middle generation, and the older generation, or the daughters/sons, the mothers/fathers (or the parents), and the grandmothers/grandfathers (or the grandparents). Fictional names are used for the participants.

All the 46 students were from the academic track of upper secondary school. Students in the ‘academic track’, in contrast with those in the ‘vocational track’, typically aim for higher education. This choice was to see how young people relate to education – which like other domains of life has undergone dramatic transformation – at their double transition to adulthood and to higher education or the larger society. Given the study’s interest in the urban only child generation, it was also natural to recruit informants from the academic track because most urban adolescents go to such upper secondary schools. To obtain some spread in academic performance and socio-economic background of the participants for exploratory purposes, I recruited boys and girls from one high-reputation ‘key school’ and one ‘ordinary school’ of average-mediocre reputation. Beijing’s secondary schools are ranked as either key schools or ordinary schools. Key schools have better qualified teachers and superior facilities. Key schools mainly recruit highly select students based on entrance exams (although subject to higher school fees, others with somewhat lower results may also enroll). Their students are at a considerable advantage in accessing university. The participants included ‘top’, ‘average’ and ‘low-perfo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Modernization and social change
• 3 The rise of the ‘priceless’ Chinese child: childhood in three generations
• 4 Daxue as the norm: the rise of the Chinese ‘schooled society’ over three generations
• 5 The aspiring male individual: the rise of chenggong as a new hegemonic masculine ideal
• 6 The aspiring female individual: ‘wanting to have it all’ as a new female ideal
• 7 An expressive turn with a Chinese twist: young people’s other-sex relations in three generations
• Conclusion: the maximization desire: living modernization the Chinese way
• Glossary
• Index