Youth Cultures in China

Jeroen de Kloet, Anthony Y. H. Fung

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781509512980
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Asian American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

What does it mean to be young in a country that is changing so fast? What does it mean to be young in a place ruled by one Party, during a time of intense globalization and exposure to different cultures?

This fascinating and informative book explores the lives of Chinese youth and examines their experiences, the ways in which they are represented in the media, and their interactions with old and, especially, new media. The authors describe and analyze complex entanglements among family, school, workplace and the state, engaging with the multiplicity of Chinese youth cultures. Their case studies include, among others, the romantic fantasies articulated by pop idols in TV dramas in contrast with young students working hard for their entrance exams and dream careers.

This book will be essential reading for students and scholars of youth culture, the sociology of youth and China studies more broadly. By showing how Chinese youth negotiate these regimes by carving out their own temporary spaces – from becoming a goldfarmer in a virtual economy to performing as a cosplayer – this book ultimately poses the question: Will the current system be able to accommodate this rapidly increasing diversity?

1
Youth and Power: Education, Family, and the State

When youth are strong, the nation is strong

When youth move forward, the nation then moves forward.

Liang Qichao (1873–1929)

Introduction

Liang Qichao was a Chinese philosopher, scholar, journalist, and a supporter of the most important student movement in the early decades of the twentieth century, the May Fourth Movement. His will to save the country was always no more than “self-strengthening,” and according to his words, such seed should spark off from the youth. Given that Liang pushed in his writings for democracy in China, would he also advise youth to be the democratic pioneers in contemporary China? We would presume that if Liang were still alive, his call for democracy would not be answered by youth today, resonating with the same failure of his short-lived reform, the Hundred Days Reform during the late Qing Dynasty in the summer of 1898. If the monarchy or forces for the restoration of the monarchy were the major obstacles those days, what he would face nowadays would not just be the People's Liberation Army of the Communist Party. Rather than operating in such a top-down mode, power now traverses through every domain of society, including its institutions like school and the workplace, in everyday life and the desires for love, material well-being and success, as well as through and in the media. We witness a Foucauldian intensification of power: “power becomes lighter, more ubiquitous, less attached to ‘negative’ objects or practices (the disciplinary family, ‘the father's no’), and more saturated within formerly ignored realms of social practice. In short, power becomes more effective while offering less obvious potential for resistance” (Nealon 2008: 71).

In the following chapters we are predominantly concerned with these intensifications of power in realms beyond the family and the state, in particular media, everyday life practices, and technologies of the self. In this chapter we engage with the strong ideologies in a triumvirate of institutions that span private and public domains in China, namely family, schooling, and politics. As Liu Fengshu remarks, the pressure for urban youth comes mainly “from high parental expectations typical of the only-child family, the exam-oriented educational system and fierce competition in society and the changed standard of a ‘good life’ ” (Liu 2013: 89). In a study among students in Fujian, the respondents were asked what was most troublesome to them. Their top three resonate with the results of Liu's study: 50 percent replied they don't have a clear goal to fight for, 48.9 percent listed the difficulty of finding a job as a key problem, while 38.5 percent referred to study pressure (Lin 2008: 86).

The competition in society is, as we will show in this chapter, entangled with Party membership. To discuss familism, pedagogy, and partyism in this chapter helps us to understand the forces that bracket youth culture. With the ever (re)structuring society, economy, and politics, youth in urban China fall into the orbit of family in private life, school in public life, and politics in both domains. With only rare exceptions in rural areas, youth have been segregated from production and largely put under these systems to learn, reproduce, and practice the ideologies that they are being taught daily. From the discipline imposed upon them in the family to the textbooks of a school, they are all molded into subjectivities that prepare them not only for family life and life at school but also later in the society at large. In what can be seen as an increasingly value-vacuous society, the influence of the family has returned with a vengeance and it can be argued that it exerts an even stronger surveillance over the new generation given that the development of a single child in a typical family is being planned and prearranged by his or her family until, and even after, their marriage. The missed opportunities parents experienced because of the Cultural Revolution often amplifies their expectations toward the life of their only child – although again this will be different in rural areas and among minorities, where one can have more than one child. Politics, through the organs of the Communist Party, penetrates into school, community, workplace, and any listed institutions in society. As such, it infiltrates profoundly into the everyday life of Chinese youth, governing their life, career, and promotion chances.

In that sense, it is not accurate to read the family, the school, or the state as univocal disciplinary institutions that impose their views on youth. What we describe here echoes more Foucault's concept of governmentality, which is not only limited to the state's centralized control. It extends through various capillaries of social and cultural channels to manage political activities and events, family and household, and pedagogy and education. Governmentality here refers to the conduct of conduct, meaning that there exists knowledge or a set of rules in society that defines, restricts, and normalizes norms, practices, obligations, responsibilities, and disciplines of an individual, a family, or an organization (Lemke 2002). We seldom talk about top-down power at this point, not because there is no power and coercion in the hierarchical society in China. Instead, we adopt a framework of governmentality to understand the relationship between government and its governance and the everyday management of citizenship, desires, labor (as illustrated in chapter 5), sex and gender identity (as illustrated in chapter 4) by examining imported global and popular culture (as illustrated in chapters 2 and 3), discourse on social media, marriage, and rituals, respectively (e.g. Jeffreys and Sigley 2009). The power exercised toward others with the intention to maintain order limits the behavioral range of possibilities for youth. The concept of governmentality here articulates power with political knowledge as well as discovers and regurgitates the rationality based on which such power is exercised spontaneously (Foucault 1981). In daily life, thus we can see that youth, parents, teachers, and social institutions in various domains all follow various practices and values that more or less reflect the systematized telos or reasoning of actions. These values and practices can be readily read in youth's daily lives, from family interactions, learning and schooling, and job employment, to name a few.

Political Values and Party Membership

To what extent do Chinese youth support the China Dream of Xi Jinping? The study we quoted in the previous chapter comparing different generations gestured to an increasingly critical attitude toward the authorities. But other studies show at the same time a strong support for China's current path. In a comparative study between the generations born in the 1980s (sample of 800, taken in 2004) and 1990s (sample of 1200, taken in 2009), 47.0 percent of the 1980s generation and 45.5 percent of the 1990s generation would agree with the statement that “socialism will beat capitalism,” while 41.6 percent and 50.1 percent respectively agree with the statement that “socialism and capitalism will gradually be the same.” Interestingly, while from the 1980s generation 58.8 percent think that until the middle of the twenty-first century China will be a socialist country led by the CCP, among the 1990s generation this figure is even higher: 79.0 percent (Zou 2011: 71–2). This increase in support may also be due to the timing of the two surveys, in 2009, just after the Beijing Olympics, more youth may be in support of the system than five years before that.

A study among college students, published in China in 2013 and based on a sample of 6727 surveys in 19 different colleges in China, shows how much the respondents continue to support the Party line. For example, 42.9 percent claim to be very confident in China's rejuvenation in the twenty-first century, and 49.7 percent are confident, only 7.4 percent are less confident or not confident at all (Shi 2013: 24). When comparing this confidence between Party members, Communist Youth League members, and non-members, however, there is quite a striking difference; while from the former two categories only 5.3 percent and 6.8 percent do not feel confident about China's rejuvenation, among the non-members, this figure is clearly higher: 33.4 percent. The figures for confidence in the future development of the socialist road with Chinese characteristics are quite similar; while only 6.1 percent of the Party members and 11.4 percent of the Communist Youth League members lack confidence, among non-members this figure is much higher: 40 percent. However, the figures on which this comparison is based are skewed: at college, most students are members of either the Party or the Youth League. In this sample, 28.4 percent are CCP members, 68.2 percent are members of the Youth League, and only 3.4 percent are non-members (Shi 2013: 26–7). We combined some of the most interesting figures pertaining to political values from this book-length study in table 1.1. Also here there are stark differences between the very small portion of non-members, and the much larger number of Party members in the sample, with the former being less inclined to toe the Party line. These figures suggest quite solid support for the authorities, but the reasons for joining the Party may be much more pragmatic, rather than ideological.

Table 1.1. Political values of Chinese college students

Looking for a job is a major challenge for Chinese youth nowadays. China does not release youth unemployment figures, but there are reasons to believe they are high. The first and the largest-scale study “China's First Youth Employment Condition Survey Report,” jointly released in 2005 by the official All-China Youth Federation (ACYF) and Institute of Human Resources and Society Security (ISS) (Dai 2005), already indicated that the unemployment rate had reached 15 percent for those under the age of 21. Given that the working population increases by 20 million annually and that there are only 10–16 million available jobs, youth's job search is expected to be an uphill struggle. In 2014, CNBC figures indicated that the youth unemployment rate had reached 9.6 percent (Tao 2014). Given that China is the nation with the highest economic growth rate, a rate that started to falter in the year 2015 however, it is indeed a very high figure. Yet, the new generation has to survive. The cracks in the rice bowl of Chinese youth (Zhang 2000), a result of the dismantling of social security in post-Deng China, result in an increasingly precarious future for Chinese youth, characterized by less and less security in terms of income and job status. Graduating from Tsinghua and Peking University and even from elite universities overseas might secure a job in international companies. For those who are less lucky – and they are the majority – searching for a stable occupation in the huge field of government offices or related organizations is perhaps the second best strategy. As the Party system operates in parallel with the government, a Party member in many ways has advantages over non-members. To be a Party member is an advantage when applying for jobs, especially in public positions. Thus, partyism is also becoming a religion in a secular sense: it is not just subscribing to a belief; being a Party member gives certain groups of people a strategic advantage in securing a job, and also a sense of pride, especially during a time when the Communist Party is steering the nation to become a world political and economic center of power. To the end of 2014, official figures indicated that the number of Communist Party members had reached 87.8 million, and the number of members aged under 35 was 22.5 million, constituting 25.6 percent (Renminwang 2015). Over the years, the number of Party members has increased: in 2007, 73.4 million Chinese were Party members, 6.4 million more than the number in 2002. In 2007, 17.4 million of them (23.7 percent) were aged under 35 (gov.cn 2007). These figures show how more, rather than fewer, Chinese opt to become a Party member, but in total, approximately only 6.4 percent of the population are members.

Image 2. State presence at the 2012 Strawberry Music Festival (photo by Jeroen de Kloet)

Partyism here refers to the tendency toward an active participation and organization of political parties under a political system. Of course, under the PRC, it refers to a uni-partyism concept that we use to describe the inseparability of youth, school, and work with the Party. In school, the Party secretary rules in conjunction with the Principal in high school and the President in university, respectively. There are also youth partisan leaders in each class. This system is designed as a control mechanism to discipline the alternative voices and to mainstream Party ideology. However, political as it is, its perceived function changes in the eyes of youth. While a youth member has to attend regular meetings to plead loyalty, receive Party education, and report “irregularities” among their cohorts, these obligations are also exchanged with concrete and tangible rewards and privileges in different settings.

A particularly salient example comes from the Party's role in the workplace. Communist Party membership these days in China is important in particular to secure a leadership position in a public institution. But it is also a point of contention; no youth would be willing to utter his or her views about the Party in public. If youth were asked whether they would like to join the Party, they would probably keep their mouth shut or respond in an ambiguous manner for various reasons. A member we interviewed told us implicitly that because Communist members in the peer's community might still carry negative connotations such as dictatorship or corruption, she tried not to publicly declare that she was a Party member. Quite obviously, Chinese youth want to evade discrimination from those that share an undesirable attitude toward the Party.

Admittedly nowadays, having reached out to the world through the Internet and the influx of global culture into China, Party members might not openly justify the various practices of the Party, including issues of freedom, human rights and bureaucracy, but they would not defy Party rules or discredit Party ideologies either. Resonating with the beliefs of many Chinese, for the new generation, there is a discrepancy between what the Communist Party advocates on the ideological level and the pseudo-“socialist market economy” practiced on the implementation level – also referred to as a controlled capitalist econ...