ABSTRACT
It is widely accepted that 40 years of reform have profoundly impacted upon the experiences, dispositions and outlooks of China’s youth, or qingnian, translated as “young” or “green” years (see, for example, Cockain 2016b). According to Stanley Rosen, for example, an increasingly pluralised society is reflected in Chinese youth who are “far from unified” in their “belief systems” and “behaviors” (2009: 360). Ethnographic data generated by Rosen even suggests a new generation is born every three years due to the rapidity with which factors like new technology affect generational characteristics (2011: 7). Consequently, in marked contrast to the past when the social category of youth was purportedly expansive enough to subsume other identities, like those relating to gender (see, for example, Wang 2001: 33), a proliferation of expressions has emerged to refer to xinxinrenlei, or “new, new youth”, the term literally denoting a new species. There are, for example, the fenqing, or “angry youth” who sometimes “take to the streets in nationalist protests” (see, for example, Tang 2016: 52). Or the linglei qingnian, or “alternative youth” (see, for example, Drissel 2012), whose lives are often depicted against the backdrop of bars and nightclubs (see, for example, Farrer 2002) and who sometimes appear to “reflect Western kinds of modernity and individualism” (Moore 2005: 358). More recently, there are the diaosi, or “losers” – literally “penis hair” – who seem to acquire notoriety by eschewing conventional, and often hotly pursued, signifiers of success in contemporary China. 1 And, unsurprisingly, there are many more, given the group encompasses some 500 or 600 million persons, according to the broader definition of youth which often circulates in China (Liu 2011: 6). 2 However, despite the emergence of these figures that come to the fore at different times and within different discourses, the figure of the burdened student looms large in many accounts of post-reform Chinese youth. He or she is the subject of not only numerous documentary programmes but also newspaper and journal articles and is typically captured dazed, bespectacled and track suited – the mandatory uniform adopted in many schools across China – while either seated or asleep at a desk upon which innumerable books are stacked (see, for example, Jacka et al. 2013: 164). Such persons’ stories invariably unfold against the backdrop of the “stress” and “impossible expectations” Chinese children must “endure” while preparing for the gaokao, or the National College Entrance Examination, their final school exam (see, for example, Ash 2016).
