It’s going to be very difficult for people in the west to understand how young Chinese men and women feel, unless they imagine how they themselves felt in the nineteen-sixties, when things were “crazy” and there were assassinations, and fires, and riots, and war, and injustice, and everyone felt like they were involved even when they weren’t (or so they tell me).
In China, young people are disaffected. The world is changing fast, faster than they can understand, but they do understand that, even if only as something big moving just beyond the edge of their eyes. Families and traditional systems of mentally organizing the world no longer work, and parents don’t understand children, and children don’t understand parents, and people don’t understand themselves. There are economic problems: finding work is hard, then there are long hours (so long), and little money (so little), and always pressure to succeed even when success is undefined and impossible anyway. The gap between the rich and the poor is massive and growing; and there are social problems: crime (but did they have a choice?), terrorism (but for higher ideals?), corruption at all levels of government (but can you hate them all, even the one’s who did nothing wrong?). There are moral problems, all the moral problems of modernity and change and newness fighting together and against one another: homosexuality? Divorce? Sex and love and violence? Everything that anyone of any age ever didn’t understand.
What does a young man or woman in China believe in? There is no religion. There is no Vietnam war. There is no hippie culture. There is no rock and roll, there are no Beatles, no Stones, no Jimi Hendrix. There is no civil rights movement. There is no cold war. There is no Irak. There is no “culture war.” There is no new grassroots, Internet progressivism. There is no Mao, no Deng, no Zhou Enlai. No Cultural Revolution. No communist revolution, to join or to fight against. There is only a helpless, headlong, terrified, wondrous sprint into the future, whatever that means.
These recent years, the true Great Leap Forward, this last generation, this current generation, is very different from Americans of the nineteen-sixties. But they are disaffected, and they do need things to believe in, and what they have is their country and what it has done for them and their own (and somehow, after all, it’s not just young people). I do not condone “cheap patriotism” as a Mr. Wen refers to some recent opinions. Especially when people I know and love are hurt by it, as they have been. But the greatest things that have emerged from this thing (the written children of long misapprehension) are efforts to spread understanding.
There are a lot of things to say to a lot of people, but I thought I’d start here. I write this as a metaphor, not as truth, because I think this metaphor will help people think in a slightly different way.
