Revolution? No thanks, I'm busy shopping

A young woman at the Gate of Heavenly Peace opposite Tiananmen Square. Twenty years after the bloody crackdown, many say young people in the Chinese capital are less interested in politics. (Josh Chin/GlobalPost)

BEIJING — Two decades later, the government was there. Hundreds of police, uniformed and plainclothes, watching the tourists take refuge from the Beijing sun under a sea of multi-colored parasols. Mao Zedong was there, too, staring out at the square from his framed perch above the gate. But there would be no repeat of the showdown, no Tiananmen Redux. The students had failed to show.

A 30-minute drive to the north, in a restaurant outside the west gate of Peking University, one of the no-shows, 25-year-old graduate student Rui Luo, tucked into a lunch of stewed chicken and kale, having just returned from sending his girlfriend off on a business trip. He was oblivious to the date.

“What? The anniversary? So that’s why there were so many police in the subway.”

As China marked 20 years since the crackdown on pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square on June 4, the notable thing about youth like Rui wasn’t that they didn’t know about the protests. It was that they didn’t spend much time thinking about them. And not just Tiananmen, but politics in general: In a recent survey of young people living in the capital, the Beijing Municipal Communist Youth League found only 20 percent had ever participated in politics, with much of that “participation” consisting of the simple expression of opinions, either online or in casual conversation.

While complaints about disengaged youth are nothing new in the West, in China the appearance of political apathy among students marks a significant change. Members of Rui’s generation, referred to within China as the post-80 generation, are the first since the end of the dynastic era not to have participated in a major political movement. And that has some wondering if the government’s post-Tiananmen policy — pre-empting pressure for political change by pushing economic development — hasn’t been a little too successful.

“The slogan we all used to live by was ‘Everyone is responsible for the rise and fall of civilization,’” said Liu Xiaobiao, 41, a journalist-turned-academic who traveled to Beijing as a student during the 1989 pro-democracy protests. “Now young people just worry about their own lives, they don’t bother with the big issues.”

If there were any young person in China you’d expect to be engaged in public affairs, it would be Rui Luo. A student at Peking University — the birthplace of numerous youth-led political movements — Rui is a few months away from receiving a PhD in environmental studies. Yet, as he ate his lunch, he drew a line between himself and the Tiananmen generation.

“Students were much more idealistic back then,” Rui said, explaining that he got interested in environmentalism as a child because his birthday fell on Earth Day. “All I want is to have a decent life doing something I like.”

In surveys and the media, the post-80s are described as being incorrigibly materialistic and lacking in moral fiber, more concerned with MP3 players and massive multiplayer online games than improving society. It’s an image that doesn’t exactly square with Rui, who described his material goals as modest: “Enough to enjoy the occasional night with friends, travel a little … ”

The question is: how much of the anxiety over Chinese youth is legitimate, and how much is just a product of a generation gap?

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/china-and-its-neighbors/090608/chinas-silent-campuses