As the anniversary of the June 4 bloodshed looms, Newsweek's Duncan Hewitt explains why China's younger generation doesn't fit the usual stereotypes. Hewitt, who is author of "Getting Rich First: Life in a Changing China", argues that understanding Chinese youth remains a complex challenge for the outside world. Here's why:
In 1989 it all seemed so simple – student protesters wanted western style multi-party democracy. In fact it wasn’t quite as simple as that. There were many different demands and concerns. Corruption, poor studying and working conditions, a simple desire for more personal space -- all played a part. A multi-party system wasn’t everyone’s top priority, but as a concept it was easy for the outside world to digest.
These days the common cliché is almost the polar opposite: China’s young people have been immersed in patriotic education. They are so proud of their nation’s economic rise, and so obsessed with their own careers and the need to find a job and earn money, that they have no interest in political or social issues. Didn’t angry protests by young people about unfair western media coverage last year -- when millions signed up to a website called Anti-CNN -- prove that any idealistic admiration of Western values has evaporated?
The financial crisis has intensified such perceptions. Many in China criticize the way the world’s major powers ran their financial systems. Some, including the young-ish authors of the recently published book “Unhappy China”, argue that it was all a plot to destabilize China’s economy and undermine China’s rise.
There’s no question that attitudes among China’s citizens – and the young in particular – have shifted since 1989. This is partly the result of real economic change, which has brought a renewal of confidence and pride among many Chinese people.
But it’s also a result of the management of information – and of education – which has become far more sophisticated in the past two decades. In terms of news management, the Chinese government knows that, in the internet age, it can no longer blot out all negative stories, or ban access to all foreign media sites.
But a combination of selective blocking and filtering on key issues (Taiwan, Tibet, Tiananmen and Falun Gong among them) -- while allowing China’s domestic media to be sufficiently lively and colorful that most people don’t bother to go elsewhere for information -- means that on certain key issues most people more or less accept the government line.
The result is that generally extremely well-informed people have gaps in their knowledge. It’s not just obvious things, like the fact that most young Chinese wouldn’t recognize the picture of the so-called “Tank Man”, carrying a bag and blocking the line of tanks – to many in the west the iconic image of 1989 in Beijing.
The phenomenon also applies to things like the Democracy Wall movement of the late 70s, a brief flowering of free expression first tolerated and later suppressed by Deng Xiaoping. This movement saw the emergence of some of China’s first radical writers, artists and political dissidents, and is agreed by most foreign historians to have been a key moment in the nation’s recent history. When, without thinking, I referred to this in a conversation with some Chinese university students not long ago, they looked at me blankly and said they’d never heard of Democracy Wall. When I then told this story to a highly educated graduate in his thirties, he looked at me with equal incomprehension.
The patriotic education campaign introduced in all schools and colleges in the aftermath of Tiananmen has certainly also had its impact. It emphasized the official line on some of the key issues mentioned above – and also, by its focus on the history of China’s oppression by Western powers from the 19th century on. That makes it natural for many young people to view contemporary Western criticism of China as part of a tradition of arrogance and bullying – something which serves the government’s purposes of using nationalism to unite the country very nicely.
Many in the West were shocked by the angry response of Chinese students to foreign criticisms of China’s policy in Tibet last year (following the riots in Lhasa and the disruption of the Olympic Torch relay in Paris). Yet in the context of both the education system and the growing confidence of China’s young generation it should not have been a surprise. Not only do most people accept the government’s basic historical line on such issues, but even those Chinese people who are often critical of their leaders don’t like being told what to do – or think – by foreigners. (Given what people in China have been taught about history, it’s as if a group of well-meaning Germans had begun criticizing the U.K. government over its Northern Ireland policy in the 1970s – an intervention which would have been unlikely to find a warm welcome in the British tabloid press…)
Understanding such perceptions is important for the outside world. We can dismiss it all as Chinese government propaganda. But the perception of Western arrogance and thoughtlessness remains damaging in countries like China – and enables the government to activate nationalism easily, almost at the flick of a switch, when it suits.
Nor has the West helped its case by appearing uninterested in addressing the legacy of its own failings – and its colonial history. One of the few Western leaders who did seek to address such Chinese concerns was Bill Clinton, during his visit to Beijing in 1998, when, in a speech at Peking University, he was frank about the US’ own failings in terms of slavery, racism and power politics. But did Britain ever make any kind of apology for its gunboat diplomacy in the Opium Wars, and its seizure of Chinese territory through what are still known in China as the “unequal treaties”?
All this means that, on key issues, even those young people who are exposed to foreign versions of historical events which differ from those taught by their own government are sometimes inclined to be suspicious – however correct the Western reports may actually be. This was confirmed by the Chinese government’s increasing confidence last year to allow its media to report – and denounce – Western criticisms of China, something it would not have dared to do in the past.
Yet at the same time – and equally importantly – this doesn’t mean members of China’s young generation are completely uninterested in political or social issues. Meeting young people, I am often struck by the fact that many have questions about how political systems function abroad and about the role of the media in the west – particularly how critical it can be of its own government.
And there’s no doubt that many young people, not only students but the new middle classes too – are concerned about China’s environmental problems and its divided society. More and more Chinese university students, for example, are involved in voluntary work and the NGO sector, something which, despite all manner of controls, has grown exponentially in the past decade. This is, in fact, one of the big differences between China today and in 1989: these days there are practical channels which allow those who feel they want to change or improve their society to actually do something about it – up to a point – without necessarily becoming political dissidents or adversaries of the government.
The other major difference is undoubtedly the Internet: in 1989 people who were angry about corruption went on the streets. These days many of them go online – the number of cases of corrupt officials being revealed or denounced in internet forums has increased rapidly in the past couple years. Since most people in China now know that the consequences for real direct action – organizing street protests and so on – are severe – virtual protest on the internet is generally seen as safer (though of course people have also been jailed for things they have posted online.)
As a social space and an outlet for grievances, the internet is arguably more important in China than in any Western society. So much news in China now spreads through the internet before the country’s conventional or official media dares to touch it.
Witness the recent furor over the case of Deng Yujiao, the bathhouse waitress in Hubei province who stabbed a local official to death, allegedly to stop him from raping her. When the police glibly announced that she was to be charged with murder, an outburst of online opinion in her favor led other Chinese media to investigate the case further, and young volunteers to go to Hubei to try to offer their support. The controversy also appears to have resulted in the police toning down the charges, and another official whom Deng also stabbed but who survived is now under investigation.
The internet is also frequently a forum for complaints about the excesses of officials such as the ‘chengguan’, a kind of urban management SWAT squad introduced in Chinese cities in recent years, whose aggressive behavior, particularly to migrant workers and unlicensed street vendors, has aroused growing public anger. An incident involving chengguan and vendors outside a university in Nanjing recently led to students protesting in sympathy with the migrant workers. Hackers (presumably young and angry!) subsequently attacked and defaced the website of the chengguan in another city in the same province.
Clearly greater space for expression on the internet does not represent political democracy – indeed some have argued that the lack of other channels for expressing views leaves the internet in China particularly vulnerable to rumor, distortion, and uninformed anger. Well-known Chinese publisher Lu Jinbo recently warned that the Chinese internet was increasingly filled with “Nationalism. Hatred. Bigotry. Violence”.
Moreover when internet activists have pooled their resources to seek out information on certain stories or issues – a phenomenon known in Chinese as the ‘human flesh search engine’ – the result has sometimes been witch-hunts against certain individuals by an online mob. The internet can also be a channel for outpourings of virulent nationalism. But the net is undoubtedly also a forum for voices seeking social change – and exchanging views which could not have been expressed publicly in China 20 years ago.
Young people in China are also strikingly protective of openness on the internet, which many seem to regard as their personal space - after all they’ve more or less grown up with it. I have often heard young people complaining bitterly about the authorities blocking access to foreign sites they want to use – though they’re more likely to be concerned about access to sites like Flickr, YouTube or Wikipedia, than to the websites of mainstream western media organizations.
Indeed, today’s young generation -- with their far improved access to education and information on most subjects,not to mention better material conditions -- generally tend to be more aware of their worth as individuals. This undoubtedly does include a growing rebellious streak, which can be targeted at authority. The fashion for rebellious heroes in comics, computer games and TV series in recent years is evidence of this.
The Chinese government is increasingly aware of such developments, hence its dive into the world of trendy animation and youth culture. It has encouraged computer games and cosplay (animation role play games), but often seeks to use these as modern vehicles to convey traditional patriotic messages. Thus there are computer games featuring Chinese soldiers fighting the Japanese, manga-style animations about heroic communist soldiers on the Long March of the 1930s, and so forth.
There’s little doubt that the Chinese government’s growing understanding – and tolerance – of young people’s desire to be different enabled it to channel their sense of rebellion into anger directed against Western ‘bullying’ over Tibet and the Olympics last year. But just because young people are patriotic on certain issues at certain times does not mean they will agree with the government on everything, or that they will never criticize it.
With the limits to education and information which continue to apply, and the legacy of continuing suspicion of the West, the opinions of China’s young generation today are undoubtedly fragile. They are more confident about China’s position in the world– but they are also sensitive about it, and can be easily alienated by anything which can be perceived as arrogant, patronizing or stereotyping behavior from abroad. At the same time, many are concerned about China’s shortcomings, and retain a keen interest in the world (Indeed, for all the talk of cultural difference, the ability of Chinese people to fit in with foreign societies when they go abroad is striking.) For the outside world to see them simply as self–obsessed and simplistic nationalists does not help. It’s our turn to try to understand them, and to catch up with their increasingly complex reality.
