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China's youth no longer afraid to talk about sex and question life

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Ananth Krishnan
Ananth KrishnanJan 21, 2015 | 10:49

China's youth no longer afraid to talk about sex and question life

When Qing Yin started her weekly call-in show on relationships ten years ago on China National Radio, the country's most widely listened to state radio station, the majority of her listeners were timid first-time callers. Qing was a trailblazer in launching a radio show on relationships and marriage on China's famously conservative state-run media. Even as early as a decade ago, there were few outlets for young Chinese to turn to for advice on relationships or sex. "I have hosted this show for ten years," Qing told me. "And not many dared to ask me about things we call 'sensitive', like sex."

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Qing Yin has been the trailblazer in launching a radio show on relationships on China National Radio.

Today, however, it's quite a different story. Over the past few years, Qing has noticed a transformative shift in attitudes among China's next generation - those born in the 1990s, known in China as the "jiulinghou" or "post-'90s". The post-'90s were markedly "more open, compared to even five, ten years ago", Qing told me, when I interviewed her for an article on rapidly changing social mores in China and the tension between the next generation and older Chinese, which appeared as part of last week's India Today Teen Sex Survey issue.

The changes in China are fascinating, not least because they mirror what is beginning to happen in India. China is five or ten years ahead of the curve in terms of a fast-urbanising and more open society; India may have to confront those same changes sooner rather than later, as the results of India Today's teen sex survey showed. As a trained psychiatrist, Qing has her pulse on changing societal trends. And she sees a generation that is bolder, and knows what it wants.

This boldness, needless to say, goes beyond sex. The "post-'90s" in China are an often much derided lot. The older generation sees them as spoilt and lacking values, best symbolised by the young girl who went on a popular Chinese dating show and turned down an earnest, humble and hardworking suitor, telling him: "I'd rather cry in a BMW than laugh on the backseat of your bicycle". The post-'90s are aspirational. They are demanding. Above all, they believe - and expect - that with every generation, they will have a better life.

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At the same time, they are, for the most part, politically disinterested. China's authoritarian one-party state, needless to say, prefers it that way. The grand bargain that the party has offered them is the promise of a better life for political acquiescence. In a recent post, Beijing-based writer Kaiser Kuo described a fascinating - and rather provocative - analogy that teases out this bargain, evident in how China's next generation, which grew up in the shadow of the June 4, 1989 Tiananmen massacre, is often silent about that tragedy. He makes the point, correctly, that it is not about ignorance. Kuo writes how many are reluctant to confront the wrongs of the massacre, and often prefer to "move on" - a reluctance that often confounds outsiders. Kuo's brief essay is worth reading in full, but below I produce his provocative analogy:

"I was in a conversation with a native Beijinger in her early 40s who spun the rudiments of a little analogy-cum-parable that I thought I could flesh out. It concerns a woman whose husband, years ago, had an episode of violent rage... The wife decided, despite the heinousness of what her husband had done, not to leave him or to press charges: Her life before him had been hard, and they were starting to build something together. Her previous husband had been much, much worse... And so in the interest of creating a stable life for her kids she decided to try and make the marriage work. The wife has a friend who, though doubtless well-intentioned, reminds the woman at every turn about this episode of domestic violence and urges her constantly to confront her husband, insisting on some kind of reckoning, of admission and contrition. They'd known one another before this all happened, and her friend even took photos to document her bruises. The woman is conflicted: Part of her has always wanted to confront him, and knows that it would be the right thing to do...

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But now? Now she risks an ugly divorce, maybe even another beating, and to tell the truth, life has actually been pretty good. Since the incident, the family has been stable and prosperous, at least. They've bought a comfortable home that they've redone a couple of times already. She's wearing nice clothes and driving a fancy car. Her kids are doing very well. They're dealing with a lot of other issues, too: squabbles with the neighbours, undertaking a remodelling of the ventilation system, some looming financial issues. Why reopen the old wound? Why is this friend of mine, she thinks, so patronising as to think I don't have agency in this, and that she understands our marriage and the decisions that I made? And besides, it's been 25 years, and we're both different people now. Was it really right of her to tell the kids about it?"

It is an analogy that is provocative, to be sure, and would trouble anyone. How can a horrific episode in history be airbrushed? "Move on" has little meaning when there hasn't been justice. But the reality is that it does raise interesting questions, and to some extent, captures the dilemma facing China's next generation.

Recently, I was thinking about Qing Yin's bold callers - and Kuo's analogy - when I spent a considerable amount of time in the company of two very different post-'90s groups. The first was at a grand launch for the popular smartphone maker Xiaomi's latest product. Last week, Xiaomi, whose elegant but economical smartphones are also becoming the rage in India, borrowed a trick from the Apple playbook, building up a huge amount of suspense before its flagship launch in Beijing on January 15. I arrived at the venue a good three hours early, and found hundreds of young Chinese queuing up in the smoggy cold (the air pollution that day was off the charts, but that didn't deter them). Most were in their early 20s, and fresh graduates. Their biggest pressure: finding a good job and grappling with Beijing's increasingly out-of-reach housing prices. They love their smartphones. They are far removed from the stereotypical portrait of Chinese savers - they are spenders with a capital S.

It is to reach out to this generation that President Xi Jinping launched his presidency with a "Chinese Dream" campaign, which aims to convey the message, borrowing from the promise of the "American Dream", that the next generation in China can fulfill their aspirational ambitions under his leadership. It is a rather dangerous promise to make - and a difficult one to keep - as my interaction with the second post-'90s group told me.

These were kids pretty much the same age as the Xiaomi hopefuls, but their Chinese dream had begun to sour. My second group of dining companions were all fresh college grads in the southwestern Chinese city of Kunming, known as China's city of eternal spring. Last year, thousands of Kunming youth took to the streets to protest the government's announcement of building a Paraxylene (PX) chemical plant near the city.

My friends told me it was their first ever involvement in a mass protest. They carefully prepared hundreds of anti-PX masks, and despite the presence of riot police, marched through Kunming. Their main grouse was that despite documented public health hazards of PX, the government had secretly pushed through a deal for a factory. There were no public consultations or transparent impact assessments.

The local party leadership may have gotten away with it even ten years ago. But there were two main reasons why they were forced to listen. The first is technology. Despite the wide censorship restrictions still in place in China, technology has made possible access to information for those who choose to seek it. The young Kunming residents took to WeChat and Weibo - China's Twitter equivalent - to spread the word.

The second has to do with China's next generation. They may be apolitical, but their expectations are vastly different. My dining companions in Kunming told me they were not interested in politics. They all support the Communist Party, they said. But at the same time, they are passionate about their right to a better life. They demand it, and won't stand for less.

The Communist Party has in the three decades since Tiananmen defied naysayers - as well as numerous "China collapse" books that sparked their own mini-industry. The party is already treading new ground. As numerous articles have pointed out, it will soon become the longest surviving Communist leadership in history. The Soviet Union lasted 69 years. The Communist Party of China will, as of this year, be in power for 66 years.

China has so far defied the conventional wisdom that a rising middle class will bring democracy. At the same time, incomes are only now reaching those levels that have been usually associated with political transformations - China will in the next couple of years reach per capita income levels that saw changes in South Korea and Taiwan. The big question facing China's Communist Party - and one that will affect the world - is that as it sells its "Chinese Dream", can it match and live up to those rising expectations. The answer will likely come from China's next generation. And that's why they matter.

Last updated: January 21, 2015 | 10:49
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