2022-01-05 18:05:16
China’s Reform Generation Adapts to Life in the Middle Class - Peter Hessler
During the nineteen-nineties, I taught English literature, and I sometimes asked students to act out scenes from Shakespeare. As we stayed in touch over the years, certain character roles continued to develop, like plays that never ended. One girl who had performed Juliet—wearing a red dress, standing atop a wooden desk in the balcony scene—enjoyed a successful post-Romeo career with the local government bureau that managed the one-child policy. The best Hamlet I ever taught died in Horatio’s arms, joined the Communist Party, moved to Tibet, and became a cadre in the Propaganda Department.
For a Chinese person born in the nineteen-seventies, success sometimes felt like an accident.
Middle-aged Chinese had grown up alongside the changes that were initiated in 1978, by Deng Xiaoping’s Reform and Opening policy, and many of them had participated in the largest internal migration in human history, as more than a quarter of a billion people moved from the countryside to the cities.
They usually described themselves as “peasants,” a word that had no stigma at a Marxist college. When they wrote essays about their families, they put themselves somewhere between the horrors of the Communist past—the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution—and whatever the future might hold.
Later in life, Youngsea described this period in terms that were almost fable-like. Initially, he had been motivated by a desire to protect his girlfriend, but, after he became rich beyond his wildest dreams, it was as if the money numbed his desire. “What we had was true love,” he said, years later. “But at that time the drive for money was stronger than anything else. She was going back and forth from home to the shop, working constantly. We bought an apartment and a car together. We were so busy; I was doing business all the time.”
Ever since 2012, when Xi Jinping, the General Secretary of the Communist Party, initiated a series of strict anticorruption campaigns, local officials had become more careful in their interactions with civilians. I was still in touch with a few former students who had become officials, but they never said much about their jobs, and they didn’t answer my questionnaires. One former student told me that the Party had instructed many officials not to attend school reunions, which might present opportunities for old classmates to ask for favors.
Increasingly, Chinese officials have become a class apart. In 2017, I asked on a survey if respondents frequently had contact with government officials, and twenty-six out of thirty said no. But to the next question—would you want your child to pursue a career in government service?—twenty-one responded in the affirmative. “I don’t like government men, but I like the job,” one man said. “I hope my kid could get a job as an official. The job is not hard and rewarding.”
That year, I also asked respondents if they believed that China should become a multiparty democracy, and only about a quarter said yes. A number of them said that China’s system has been successful. For others, though, the reasons were more cynical. “We already have one corrupt party,” one man said. “It will be much worse if we have more.” A woman responded, “We have seen America with multiparty, but you have elected the worst president in human’s history.” When I asked if they expected a significant change in China’s political system during the next decade, more than ninety per cent said no.
In China, generations are not usually named. There’s no equivalent of boomers, or Gen X, or millennials: the Chinese media tends to identify a cohort simply by its decade of birth. But I think of my Fuling students as part of a group that could be called the reform generation, because their lives paralleled the changes initiated by Deng Xiaoping.
51 viewsedited 15:05
T
