A new generation for China

politics/law — By Bob Riel on November 19, 2007 at 12:28 pm

There was a fascinating article recently in Time Magazine, called China’s Me Generation. It was about twentysomethings in China and how their lives have been transformed by a growing economy and China’s rise as a global economic powerhouse. Interestingly, while many of these young adults have more career choices and disposable income than ever before, they are also a largely apolitical generation to this point and are happy to let the Communist Party continue to rule the country so long as their lifestyles keep improving.

An excerpt from the story:

Six friends out on a Friday evening, the seafood plentiful, the conversation flowing. Maria Zhang–big hoop earrings, tight velvet jacket and a good deal of meticulously applied makeup–starts to describe an island that everyone is talking about off the east coast of Thailand. It has great diving, she says, and lots of Chinese, so you don’t have to worry about language.

Her friend Vicky Yang is hunched over a borrowed laptop, downloading an e-mail from a pesky client on her cell phone. An actuary at a consulting firm, Vicky needs to close a project tonight. While she phones a colleague, the dinner-table conversation moves on to snowboarding (“I must have fallen a hundred times”), the relative merits of various iPods (“Shuffle is no good”) and the sudden onrush of credit cards in China…The talk turns to China’s online-shopping business before it is interrupted by the arrival of razor clams, chili squid and deep-fried grouper.

The one subject that doesn’t come up–and almost never does when this tight-knit group of friends gets together–is politics. That sets them apart from previous generations of Chinese élites, whose lives were defined by the epic events that shaped China’s past half-century: the Cultural Revolution, the opening to the West, the student protests in Tiananmen Square and their subsequent suppression.

The conversation at Gang Ji Restaurant suggests today’s twentysomethings are tuning all that out. “There’s nothing we can do about politics,” says Chen. “So there’s no point in talking about it or getting involved.”

There are roughly 200 million adults in China under age 30, a demographic cohort that serves as a bridge between the closed, xenophobic China of the Mao years and the globalized economic powerhouse that its becoming. China’s twentysomethings are the drivers and chief beneficiaries of the country’s current boom: according to a recent survey by Credit Suisse First Boston, the incomes of 20-to29-year-olds grew 34% in the past three years, by far the biggest increase of any age group.

And because of their self-interested, apolitical pragmatism, they could turn out to be the salvation of the ruling Communist Party–so long as it keeps delivering the economic goods. Survey young, urban Chinese today, and you will find them drinking Starbucks, wearing Nikes and blogging obsessively. But you will detect little interest in demanding voting rights, let alone overthrowing the country’s Communist rulers. “On their wish list,” says Hong Huang, a publisher of several lifestyle magazines, “a Nintendo Wii comes way ahead of democracy.”