In the five decades that are the focus of this study, the spaces in which Chinese youth expressed their evolving and distinctive identities changed and expanded considerably. From furtive group singing or reading of banned materials in the safety of a private space in a village or barracks, spaces for youth-driven activities extended to urban dance halls, parks, and gymnasiums in the 1980s. At the same time whole new imaginary spaces were constructed. We have seen how the film Red Sorghum created a fictional landscape on which teenaged men inscribed something of their own fantasies and ambitions. In the same decade a new style of fiction, labelled ‘hoodlum writing’ (liumang wenxue), reached readers, who saw in the hip, alienated, and amoral stories parallels with their own lives in a rapidly changing social context. The work of Wang Shuo in particular appealed to young readers and television watchers. By the mid-1990s a virtual space was beginning to open up, populated overwhelmingly by people under twenty-five years old. The Internet produced a vast expansion in the spaces available for the expression of youthful distinctiveness and shared values.

This chapter will discuss physical spaces before moving on to the imaginative spaces associated with the pen of Wang Shuo, then examine how television and film also opened up for youth unreachable spaces, real and imagined, historical and contemporary. The rise of youth Internet activity and the uses to which Chinese netizens put these virtual spaces will form the bulk of this chapter’s analysis. Several themes will reoccur that can be broadly grouped around the labels commodification, manipulation, and deterritorialisation. Youth idols emerged who were in part the creations of companies and organisations intent on selling the products and the ways of living and attitudes that youth perceived them to engender. The groups backing the new heroes may have had benign, even noncommercial intentions, but the ways in which these ‘products’ interacted with the youth ‘market’ represented a further commodification and manipulation of Chinese cultural production and consumption. I have suggested elsewhere that this strong linkage between culture and commodity was strengthened greatly in the perhaps unlikely circumstances of the Cultural Revolution.

In the late 1960s, when American youth were longing for or enjoying summers of love, their Chinese counterparts were engaged in somewhat different activities. Some were still active as Red Guards, the shock troops who answered Chairman Mao’s call for continuing revolution and for the overthrow of his rivals in the leadership. Millions of young Chinese had started the journey to rural exile, to learn from the peasants and deepen their Maoist faith. Youth culture, epitomised by Woodstock and the wider Western youth rebellion of the 1960s, seemed to have passed China by, though Red Guards represented their own kind of revolt against established norms. Twenty years later, China was more open to outside connections and young Chinese knew about Michael Jackson, the Beatles, and much more. Distinctive youth cultures had emerged in a nation undergoing rapid change. Forty years after Woodstock, young China formed the largest mass of Internet users in the world. Despite government efforts at control, Chinese youth took to the opportunities the ’Net offered with the kind of gusto with which American youthful rebels had embraced rock ’n roll and rebellion a generation or two earlier.

This book seeks to trace the emergence and elaboration of youth cultures in China over this forty-year period. It will show that China’s youth, even in Mao’s time, were as active in their own ways at asserting their ambitions and difference as their Western counterparts. Three historical junctures in the formation of Chinese youth identity – 1968, 1988, and 2008 – provide key moments on which to map the rise of Chinese youths’ engagement with the world as China moved from the relative isolation of Maoist times to what appears to be invasive globalisation, symbolised by the Beijing Olympics. We will plot the emergence and elaboration of youth cultures from the time of the Red Guards in the 1960s through the 1980s to the current world of the Chinese Internet. The study will illustrate how the interplay between indigenous factors and foreign influences has continued, over more than forty years, to shape youth identities in the People’s Republic.

The decade of the Cultural Revolution saw the creation of distinctive modes and spheres for the assertion of youth identity. The developments in these years laid the groundwork for the emergence of youth popular culture in the 1980s and later. The Cultural Revolution is conventionally dated from 1966 to 1976. The phenomena in the first three years associated with Red Guards account for the mapping out of a space in which young people could conduct their own activities, whether in support of the current political campaigns or from more personal motivations. When Red Guards became ‘sent-down youth’ (or ‘educated youth’), starting in late 1968, the spaces for the development of youth popular culture extended to the countryside. Groups from the cities took their new sense of the possibilities for self-expression to the rural communes and even to the militarised settlements in harsher environments. Although authoritarian and bureaucratic control remained high in many areas of life, young people found an outlet by participating in performance troupes and other cultural activities. Some of these activities soon took the form of unofficial or underground cultural production. The hand-copied novels and poetry circulated among urban youth in rural settings allowed for considerable experimentation and creativity. Urban salons of returned youth and others provided a new context for discussion and debate on these new cultural phenomena. Mao’s death in September 1976 allowed these youthful expressions of identity to emerge alongside mainstream discourse, setting off a further elaboration of youth popular culture as China opened up to more outside influences. But the Cultural Revolution origins of youth culture in China are unmistakable. This chapter will explore these origins better to assess the flourishing of youth cultures from the mid-1980s to the first decade of the twenty-first century.

The spaces for the expression of youth popular culture thus moved from cities (with Red Guards) to the countryside (with sent-down youth) and back to the cities (with literary salons and other groupings). Each of these spaces offered a wide variety of expression and tastes. The degrees to which official and orthodox culture attempted to confine or channel activities in these venues also differed widely. But once young Chinese experienced the opportunity to create distinctive spheres for their own cultural expression, they could not be expected to abandon such a heady sense of freedom and power.

Youth in China since the 1960s has been a site for complex interactions between and reworkings of local and international influences. Emerging in a period of relative national isolation and introspection, youth cultures established their power from an ability to serve a wide range of needs and expectations. In the space of four decades China’s young people seemed to have gone through a process that had taken several generations in Western Europe and North America. The kinds of expressions of sometimes alienated youth identity that emerged in Western societies from at least the 1930s became common in China in half a generation. This study has tried to show that expressions of youth identity and their social impact took on distinctly China-based characteristics. Former Red Guards became the managers and promoters of rock bands in the 1980s, providing a new soundtrack to lives undergoing rapid change as the economy grew by ten percent each year in the subsequent decades. But these transformations in the lives of all Chinese, including youth, cannot be understood through mapping phenomena according to grid patterns of simple binaries: Chinese and Western, local and global, or traditional and modern. The developments were more complex and also spontaneous, ungoverned, uneven, and unpredictable. An assumed teleology from local to global is misleading, as Chinese elements coexisted and intermingled with the international and were transformed and reinvented. In short, Chinese youth cultures emerged, grew, and were elaborated by a myriad of influences large and small. This was their strength and attraction to participants.

Echoes across Five Decades

Looking at this study’s forty years, covering five decades, many continuities, links, and echoes are obvious. The importance of performance to Chinese young people, their creativity in even the most constrained circumstances, and their attachment to heroes or idols connect the three time nodes that we have used. Performing loyalty dances to Chairman Mao or their own reworkings of the official cultural canon gave Red Guards and sent-down youth a sense of solidarity and purpose. Dancing, body building, and enjoying the new-style music had performative aspects in the 1980s. By the twenty-first century, the Internet opened a stage for netizens to present themselves (or a version of themselves) to a wide (or narrow) audience.