How the Past has Influenced Modern Chinese Youth
Historic Factors Shaping China's Modern Day Young Population
Jan 11, 2009
China's massive youth population is set to make a very important impact on the world we live in today. In order to know the type of impression they will make, it is necessary to understand who they are. In order to do that, we must understand where they have come from. Let's take a look at cultural and historic factors that have moulded modern Chinese youth characteristcs.
Confucianism and Chinese Youth
Past and modern Chinese culture has largely been ruled by Confucian values. Confucianism is concerned with good conduct, practical wisdom, and proper social relationships. Central to Confucianism, which is not a religion but is often treated as such, is the value of learning and social mobility. This is achieved through intellectual development, and education is used largely for acquisition of personal power.
Confucianism encourages collectivism in society, and there is an emphasis on obedience and loyalty towards the family and clan. However, while Confucian teaching continues to dominate certain practices in present-day China, exposure to Western culture has led to the adoption of Western values by younger-generation Chinese. However, collectivism continues to play a dominant role. Family ties and filial piety remain extremely important in Chinese adolescent life.
Chinese Youth in History
Since the sixth century BCE, students in China have been protesting against government corruption and malfeasance. When their politicisation began to wane in the 1960s, China’s then leader Mao Zedong took up extreme measures to repoliticise them.
The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR) was Mao’s so-called attempt to empower young people in China. It freed youth from authority in the summer of 1966 to early 1977. It was Mao’s desire to rid the bureaucracy of elitism and cultivate a new generation of revolutionaries.
Mao, of course, had once been young himself, and was attempting to recreate a similar atmosphere to the one he had experienced when he joined a Marxist study group at Peking University and became one of the original members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). It was during this revolution that Mao made the famous statement: ‘The young people are the most active and vital force in society, the most eager to learn and the least conservative in their thinking.’
At the end of the GPCR, youth were once again expected to submit to rigid authority under a democratic-centralist system, and many youth were sent to the countryside to work alongside and learn from peasants. It was not long until another youth-oriented event shook youth back into their shells.
In 1989, one of the most memorable tragedies of the modern world took place in China. In a political centre point, hundreds, possibly thousands, of Chinese youth were massacred after a prolonged stalemate during which they had occupied Tiananmen Square for six weeks. The political statement made by these self-sacrificing youth demanding political reforms shook the world, and the Chinese government. The event is thought to have largely shaped Chinese youth today.
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