China: A Growing Country
With China’s rapid economic growth, the lives of China’s youth are changing, from Shanghai hustle in the east to the rural traditions of the Xinjiang Autonomous Region in the West.
Dusk was settling over Beijing on October 1999, as I slipped loose from the pack of foreign journalists corralled onto risers at one side of Tiananmen Square. Tens of thousands of students were unfurling flags and singing patriotic songs-part of massive celebrations honoring the 50th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. Their faces caught theslightly surreal glow of giant television lights, and-suspecting that any second I’d be spotted and herded back to the official pen-I began taking pictures furiously.
The young are living with an almost bouindless sense of possibility in China, and with some equally large anxieties. You see it most in big cities like Beijing, Guangzhou, Shanghai, young couples are lcearly at ease with a public intimacy that would have been unthinkable just a generation ago. The country’s breackneck economic growth is spinning off new opportunities: The proportion of 18 to 24-year-olds enrolled in college has doubled in less than a decade, and the government encourages individual ambition, as long as it doesn’t run afoul of the central plan of success. But there are few role models for young people to emulate; a 25-year-old can’t follow in the footsteps of a 45-year-old: The paths that the older person took are no longer on the map.
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