BEING AVERAGE: A NEW SUCCESS OF CHINESE POSTSOCIALIST MIDDLE-CLASS YOUTH, “NO MORE SUCCESS”; THE FIXED FUTURE EXPECTATION OF CHINESE MIDDLE-CLASS YOUTH

Back to Page Authors: Shaoyu Tang

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Keywords: urban youth, China, success, post-socialism

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Abstract: Ethnographies of students’ everyday school and family lives, as well as an analysis of popular youth culture, provide unique lenses through which to understand how politics and society intervene in their education and influence their values. At home, Chinese parents embody students’ success as winning competitions by connecting their children’s material desires with high-scores. In school, a patriotic and socialist education encourages students to be heroes or altruists for their society, while teachers always remind them of the endless competition embodied by scores that forces them to be individualists. After graduation, students who were told to be the successors of socialism find themselves facing a world dominated by consumerism and global capitalism. In this paper, how young people perform success as being average, which navigates the tension between single score-orientation and complex social valuation is investigated. Coming of age under China’s transition, the youth reconcile traditional family values and collective nation-state expectations with spontaneous desires within global capitalism, consumerism, and liberalism.

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