China’s Youth Cultures and Collective Spaces

China’s Youth Cultures and Collective Spaces
Author: Vanessa Frangville
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 431
Release: 2019-09-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0429509030

Presenting the collaborative work of 13 international specialists of contemporary Chinese culture and society, this book explores the spaces of creation, production, and diffusion of "youth cultures" in China among generations born since the 1980s. Defining the concept of "youth culture" as practices and activities that catalyze self-expression and creativity, this book investigates the emergence of new physical spaces, including large avenues, parks, shopping malls, and recreation areas. Building on this, it also examines the influence of non-physical places, especially digital cultures, such as online social networks, shopping platforms, Cosplay, cyberliterature, and digital calligraphy and argues that these may in fact play a more significant role in Chinese civil society today. As an exploration of how youth can be creative even in a coercive environment, China’s Youth Cultures and Collective Spaces will be valuable to students and scholars of Chinese society, as well those working on the links between space, youth, and culture.

China's New Youth

China's New Youth
Author: Alec Ash
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2020-06-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 1950691721

“Paints a telling portrait of this most restless generation raised in a system that has provided them with unprecedented personal opportunities while denying them political ones. . . . A gifted observer.”—Washington Post "Informative and often humorous . . . Presents a refreshing range of perspectives about being twenty-something in China."—Forbes “Masterfully crafted.”—Los Angeles Review of Books “A perceptive and quietly profound book.”—Booklist, starred review "Compelling and beautifully written."—Prospect China’s new youth are the generation that will change China. Offspring of the one-child policy, with no memory of Tiananmen, they are destined to transform both their nation and the world. Understanding their motivations, dreams, and attitudes is possibly the most important gauge of China’s future direction as it plays an increasingly important role in shaping this century. China’s New Youth follows the lives of six young Chinese as they navigate their aspirations, discontents, politics, and love lives. Their stories include a netizen nationalist, a country migrant, the daughter of a Party member, a rising pop star, and a feminist entrepreneur. With intimate access to this diverse generation, Alec Ash—a young writer based in China since 2012—gives a vivid, immersive, fascinating account of young China as it comes of age. China's New Youth was originally published in hardcover until the title Wish Lanterns: Young Lives in New China. The new paperback edition has been updated with a new preface and afterword by the author and a new foreword by Karoline Kan.

Representations of Childhood and Youth in Early China

Representations of Childhood and Youth in Early China
Author: Anne Behnke Kinney
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 316
Release: 2004
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780804747318

This is the first book in any language to inquire into the emergence of childhood as a topic of significant cultural attention in Han times, as expressed in the intellectual discourse surrounding early Chinese cosmology, medicine, law, statecraft, and dynastic history.

Child and Youth Well-being in China

Child and Youth Well-being in China
Author: Lijun Chen
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 140
Release: 2018-12-07
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0429627734

The true measure of any society is how it treats its children, who are in turn that society’s future. Making use of data from the longitudinal Chinese Family Panel Studies survey, the authors of this timely study provide a multi-faceted description and analysis of China’s younger generations. They assess the economic, physical, and social-emotional well-being as well as the cognitive performance and educational attainment of China's children and youth. They pay special attention to the significance of family and community contexts, including the impact of parental absence on millions of left-behind children. Throughout the volume, the authors delineate various forms of disparities, especially the structural inequalities maintained by the Chinese Party-state and the vulnerabilities of children and youth in fragile families and communities. They also analyze the social attitudes and values of Chinese youth. Having grown up in a period of sustained prosperity and greater individual choice, the younger Chinese cohorts are more independent in spirit, more open-minded socially, and significantly less deferential to authority than older cohorts. There is growing recognition in China of the importance of investing in children’s future and of helping the less advantaged. Substantial improvements in child and youth well-being have been achieved in a time of growing economic prosperity. Strong political commitment is needed to sustain existing efforts and to overcome the many obstacles that remain. This book will be of considerable interest to researchers of Chinese society and development.

Youth Cultures in China

Youth Cultures in China
Author: Jeroen de Kloet
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 187
Release: 2016-11-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1509512985

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?

Urban Youth in China

Urban Youth in China
Author: Fengshu Liu
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2011-01-25
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 1136840508

As both youth and the Internet hold the potential to inflict far-reaching economic, social, cultural, and political changes, this book fulfills a pressing need for a systematical investigation of the lives of Chinese youth and the growth of the Internet against the backdrop of rapid and profound social transformation in China.

China's Youth

China's Youth
Author: Li Chunling
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
Total Pages: 403
Release: 2021-09-28
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0815739370

Understanding the young adults who came of age during the rise of China's economic and global power This book by a prominent Chinese sociologist explores how China's youth will influence the country's future. Focusing on millennials—those born between the early 1980s and the mid-1990s—the book examines the status, lifestyles, attitudes, values, and behaviors of this key segment of the country's population. Li Chunling's study presents a native Chinese perspective on the increasingly diverse generation that at some point will assume leadership of the country. Among the key questions addressed in the book are: How do Chinese millennials differ both from preceding generations in China and from their counterparts around the world? How can current and future relations between Chinese millennials and the Chinese government be assessed? And, what are the factors or fault lines that have shaped the intra-generational differences among China's young people? Members of this age cohort are extraordinary, and in some respects unique, in contemporary China. Their ascent has accompanied five historic and far-reaching developments. These include China's rapid economic rise, the adoption of the one-child-per-family policy, the largest domestic rural-to-urban migration in Chinese history, the opening of extensive educational opportunities abroad, and the arrival of the digital era. Young Chinese citizens have developed a comprehensive understanding of the world much faster than previous generations; millennials see themselves not as extensions of the past, but rather as the innovators of the country's future. Through expansive and in-depth empirical research on Chinese millennials and younger age cohorts (people in their late teens and early 20s), Dr. Li's book illustrates how China's younger adults reflect the growing diversity and persistent inequality in society. The book also explores how their distinct characteristics and views will shape the country's trajectory. For the outside world, developing a better understanding of this unique generation is an urgent task, given that China now has more influence on the global economy and regional security than at any other point in modern history.

Youth Culture in China

Youth Culture in China
Author: Paul Clark
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2012-05-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107379237

The lives and aspirations of young Chinese (those between 14 and 26 years old) have been transformed in the past five decades. By examining youth cultures around three historical points - 1968, 1988 and 2008 - this book argues that present-day youth culture in China has both international and local roots. Paul Clark describes how the Red Guards and the sent-down youth of the Cultural Revolution era carved out a space for themselves, asserting their distinctive identities, despite tight political controls. By the late 1980s, Chinese-style rock music, sports and other recreations began to influence the identities of Chinese youth, and in the twenty-first century, the Internet offers a new, broader space for expressing youthful fandom and frustrations. From the 1960s to the present, this book shows how youth culture has been reworked to serve the needs of the young Chinese.

Educated Youth and the Cultural Revolution in China

Educated Youth and the Cultural Revolution in China
Author: Martin Singer
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 123
Release: 2020-08-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 0472901559

The Cultural Revolution was an emotionally charged political awakening for the educated youth of China. Called upon by aging revolutionary Mao Tse-tung to assume a “vanguard” role in his new revolution to eliminate bourgeois revisionist influence in education, politics, and the arts, and to help to establish proletarian culture, habits, and customs, in a new Chinese society, educated young Chinese generally accepted this opportunity for meaningful and dramatic involvement in Chinese affairs. It also gave them the opportunity to gain recognition as a viable and responsible part of the Chinese polity. In the end, these revolutionary youths were not successful in proving their reliability. Too “idealistic” to compromise with the bourgeois way, their sense of moral rectitude also made it impossible for them to submerge their factional differences with other revolutionary mass organizations to achieve unity and consolidate proletarian victories. Many young revolutionaries were bitterly disillusioned by their own failures and those of other segments of the Chinese population and by the assignment of recent graduates to labor in rural communes. Educated Youth and the Cultural Revolution in China reconstructs the events of the Cultural Revolution as they affected young people. Martin Singer integrates material from a range of factors and effects, including the characteristics of this generation of youths, the roles Mao called them to play, their resentment against the older generation, their membership in mass organizations, the educational system in which they were placed, and their perception that their skills were underutilized. To most educated young people in China, Singer concludes, the Cultural Revolution represented a traumatic and irreversible loss of political innocence, made yet more tragic by its allegiance to the unsuccessful campaign of an old revolutionary to preserve his legacy from the inevitable storms of history.