China's Newsest Cultural Revolution Worries Elders

[TSkillet]

From the Los Angeles Times

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/la-fg-youths3jul03,1,754637.story?coll=la-home-headlines

BEIJING — When fathers of the Chinese Communist Party mapped out the road to socialist perfection, they didn't give much thought to green hair.

But amid growing concern that it is losing touch with an increasingly rebellious youth, the government recently announced a series of steps to bolster social, ethical and moral standards among underage Chinese.

"What they're really afraid of is not political dissidents. It's long hair, decadence, punks and hip-hop. That's raising more concern than anything else," said Hung Huang, publisher of the Chinese edition of Seventeen magazine. "In essence, China is experiencing its first real generation gap, and it's a 7 on the Richter scale."

Premier Wen Jiabao set the tone in late February with State Council Document #8 — cited as the most important statement on youth since the Communists swept to power in 1949 — calling on parents, teachers and the government to help strengthen and reform the virtue of Chinese minors.

The government has also banned the release of new foreign films during the school break this summer and tightened restrictions on foreign textbooks, cellphone text messaging, the Internet and racy magazines aimed at teens. It is recruiting new "upstanding youth" to serve as role models. And it is pouring money into "Youth Palaces," the national network of after-school community centers started in the 1950s to promote extracurricular activities.

By Western standards, the vast majority of China's 367 million youngsters are well behaved and hard working; many American parents would love to have China's "youth problems." Judged by traditional Confucian benchmarks, however, the younger generation seems increasingly disrespectful, out of reach and out of control.

A series of high-profile cases has put a face on last year's jarring 12.7% rise in juvenile crime. In December, a 16-year-old Beijing high school student killed his mother for "being too strict," then took $50 from her pocket and headed for an Internet cafe.

In February, a 15-year-old Beijing student stabbed a friend 17 times with a fruit knife for flirting with her boyfriend. And last month, a 23-year-old college student from Guangxi province was executed after killing his four roommates with a hammer over a card game.

Particularly vexing for senior party and government officials, analysts and party insiders say, is the limited traction that slogans and morality campaigns may have with a generation weaned on MTV and online games.

"The party is trying to do a little updating and repackaging," said Victor Yuan, chairman of Horizon, a market research firm that works for the government and private companies. "But compared to campaigns by professional ad people, they still fall short. Most young people would rather watch videos."

Young Chinese continue to join the Communist Party — though exact figures are unavailable, reports say the trend is up — but party stalwarts fret that they are embracing the red banner for the wrong reasons. Instead of identifying with party ideology, surveys suggest, many youngsters view the party as a networking opportunity, a sort of high-octane Rotary Club.

"I'm not interested in joining now but might consider it later," said Wu Yue, 22, a recent Beijing college graduate who is trying to break into television. "For a lot of young people, it's not an issue of believing in communism but getting good jobs, promotions and better pay, especially if you're in a political environment like government or the media."

At Vics, a trendy club in the shadow of Beijing's Worker Stadium, the focus is on parties of a different sort. At 10:30 on a weeknight, things start to hop as young Chinese amble past the faux Egyptian mummy, down the chrome stairs and onto the red luminescent dance floor to the thumping sound of rap and hip-hop. Some won't head home before 5 in the morning.

"I come here a few times a week for the music and the atmosphere," Chao Xu, a 22-year-old student, said at a table crowded with whisky bottles, soft drinks and cigarette butts. "There's concern about morality these days, but it's not a problem with any of my friends."

That hasn't stopped the government from trying to create a "purified" living environment for teenagers and young adults in concerts and dance halls across the country. The Culture Ministry early last month approved Britney Spears' first China tour, provided she doesn't reveal too much.

"Relevant departments will carry out strict reviews of Britney Spears' performance clothing," a state-run news agency said. The report followed the banning of Hong Kong pop diva Faye Wong's song "In the Name of Love" because the lyrics include the word "opium."

In May, the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television and local affiliates issued guidelines calling on TV anchors to stop dying their hair strange colors, wearing bizarre clothes, showing too much skin, using Hong Kong or Taiwan accents, displaying their navels or cleavage, and wearing plunging necklines or short skirts.

The guidelines also include calls to reduce sex and violence in prime-time programming as part of a broader "clean the screen" campaign.

Zhao Mengxin, an anchorwoman on several provincial CCTV shows, applauds the policies, especially those regulating dress.

"Local television is particularly bad, with anchors wearing vulgar, mismatched clothes that look like they grabbed them from the gutter," she said. "Being elegant is always in style, especially when young people are watching."

The crackdown on suggestive clothing may pale beside the task of reducing media violence. China, famous for its martial arts films, has a high cultural tolerance for violence, said Miao Di, a film and television professor with the Beijing Broadcasting Institute.

Several years ago, an American civic group approached Miao's school, voicing concern that violent Hollywood exports were tarnishing young Chinese people's minds.

"None of the Chinese thought the American shows were violent compared to our own homegrown programs," he said. "The Chinese people have always been very sensitive about sexuality but not that worried about violence."

Authorities are also trying to control young people's use of the Internet after a series of high-profile abuses, experts say.

"We're trying to enhance our influence over young people and promote traditional culture," said Cao Xuecheng, vice chief of the propaganda department of the China Communist Youth League.

This year, a video-game addict dropped dead, reportedly from stress and exhaustion, after playing "Legend of Mir II" for 20 hours in an Internet cafe in Chengdu. About the same time, two secondary school students in Chongqing were killed by a train when they fell asleep on railroad tracks after two days online.

In response, Beijing announced last month that it had shuttered 16,000 Internet cafes as part of a campaign to protect the nation's children and adolescents from corrosive influences — and, human rights activists say, to keep a tighter grip on free expression.

Non-regulated Internet cafes hurt the "mental health" of teenagers and interfere with their schoolwork, Culture Minister Sun Jiazheng said this year.

But there are plenty of loopholes. Ding Zheng, a Beijing high school student, stood in front of an Internet cafe on Beijing's Dong Street. "This is a joke," he said, pointing at a sign barring minors from entering. "They'll never stop you unless a policeman happens to be standing right here. My parents don't like me coming, but I just make up some excuse about heavy traffic and they never know."

Liu Jia, a 17-year-old student in the Shandong Nursing School, believes there is definitely a big generation gap in China these days. But many of the things that that older people perceive as threatening are survival skills for a new age, she said.

What the older generation sees as the loss of traditional culture reflects a more integrated China, she said. What elders see as brash behavior is a more confident outlook needed in a fast-paced world. And what they see as a lack of respect for elders is a healthy questioning of authority.

"Some older people might think the young are indulgent," she said. "But I think there's great potential in this generation. It's a more competitive world, and if you're too humble, you'll lose out."

[bhchao]

Here is an article in the New York Times about the recent efforts in China to monitor text messaging in mobile phones. Starting July 2nd, mobile phone companies are required to install text filtering equipment to monitor certain keywords included in text messages. Companies unable to successfully monitor will be shut down.

Registration is free and is required to view the article.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/03/international/asia/03chin.html?8hpib

The article shows that as China's economy grows more into a market economy, increased wealth allows people to have access to technology that enables them to receive and provide information, information that often exposes government corruption or the truth.

A growing market-oriented economy with the technological benefits that accompany it will inevitably lead to people demanding more personal freedoms, and the Chinese have already used technology like mobile text messaging to expose the truth over the SARS epidemic in China.

Here is a segment of the article.

"China has begun filtering billions of telephone text messages to ensure that people do not use the popular communication tool to undermine one-party rule.

The campaign, announced on Friday by the official New China News Agency, comes after text messages sent between China's nearly 300 million mobile phone users helped to expose the national cover-up of the SARS epidemic last year. Text messages have also generated popular outrage about corruption and abuse cases that had received little attention in the state-controlled media.

It is a sign that while China has embraced Internet and mobile phone technology, the government has also substantially increased its surveillance of digital communications and adopted new methods of preventing people from getting unauthorized information about sensitive subjects.

This week, government officials began making daily inspections of short-message service providers, including Web sites and the leading mobile phone companies. They had already fined 10 providers and forced 20 others to shut down for not properly policing messages passing through their communication systems, the news agency said."

[skylee]

I think it is quite unnecessary.

[TSkillet]

I think the Chinese government is quite naive to believe they can stop this - can you imagine being a monitor for instant or text messages?

"R U going 2 Tienhe with Xiao Jin?"

"No, I h8 Tienhe on Sat nite"

[ala]

The CCP can always go Che Guevera.

[ala]

A morals campaign in China

Wary of creeping individualism, China cracks down on discos, Internet, and hair dye.

By Robert Marquand | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

BEIJING - As China rapidly gains a greater share of the world's attention and wealth, its leaders have begun a quiet campaign that blends traditional Chinese and patriotic communist messages to ensure the country doesn't lose its soul.

Described as an "ideological morals" campaign, and given strong backing by President Hu Jintao, the deeply conservative initiative counters TV violence, unpatriotic school texts, the "corroding influence" of the Internet, and public figures that don't dress or dye their hair properly. It even advocates a renewed learning of revolutionary communist songs.

More than a decade ago China unleashed a spirit of commercialism with the motto "to get rich is good." Now experts say the Communist Party is seeking to curb the excesses of a newly individualistic mercantile spirit - including greed and corruption - by appealing to shared values of patriotism, and clean, healthy living.

"The traditional communist ideology is being weakened by globalized values and economy, and the Chinese government is taking a leading role in trying to revive the Chinese nation," says Li Xiguang, journalism professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing. "Hu Jintao and a set of intellectuals are taking the lead in this."

Every week seems to bring a new phase: Some 80 million Chinese Internet users this week were urged to report suspicious or unusual cyberspace activity to authorities. Chinese "netizens" can now help blacklist websites with content including religious cult activity, violence, porn, or politically sensitive subjects - by informing through a special website. Informers will have their safety and privacy ensured, according to the People's Daily.

Last week brought a ban on new Internet cafes. An age requirement of 18 was imposed on visitors to currently open cafes, which are often portrayed as dens of iniquity by state media.Dance clubs located near schools are being targeted for closing. Authorities are pressuring shops that allow photocopies of "rebellious" or "incorrect" materials. Censors are replacing evening TV programming that contains violence - including many Western programs - with Chinese family dramas. Cartoons must be family oriented.

Even rumors in late May about a visit by pop star Britney Spears became an opportunity for sending a message: If she comes to China, any revealing outfits used on stage would need official approval. No bare midriffs.

Patriotic moral campaigns have a long history in China, and some experts feel that the current one won't succeed. The early 1980s, for example, brought an initiative against "spiritual pollution" - designed to combat foreign influences and keep the body politic pure and stable, they say. But it was swept aside by China's accession to world markets, and today it is largely forgotten.

Yet unlike previous heroic patriotic campaigns that overloaded even China's ample propaganda machinery, current purification efforts seem more discreet. Party cadres and intellectuals around Mr. Hu are overseeing a series of small but numerous programs aimed broadly at the public, but especially at youth. The cause: high-level concerns over the social effect of avaricious commercialism, and new trends showing greater violence and lack of discipline among youth under 20.

In random interviews on the street, few Chinese knew ofthe morals campaign. "Most kids today know more about pop stars than about Chinese history," says one couple, new parents who work in an office complex. "We agree that Internet cafes are bad, but we think the Internet itself is a good technology."

The current late spring moral offensive in China seems to have reached a peak moment during a Hu speech to the central government on May 10 in Beijing, sources say. Hu's subject was "strengthening youth morals." The speech was partly reproduced in an education ministry memo released June 1 by the state council and circulated to all public school principals with the title "Suggestions."

Among the memo's suggestions were the reintroduction of practices in China that date to 1949. They included the idea that all students participate in daily flag raisings, and that they spend 20 days a year visiting military bases, factories, and villages. Large meetings to discuss Hu's talk were encouraged, as were student efforts to organize oral history meetings with the aging revolutionaries of the 1940s and 50s.

Hu urged state and party members at the May 10 meeting to study "how to continue using Marxism as a compass," and how to show youth to do the same. "Hu Jintao and Chinese leaders have not given up on the socialist ideal of 'the new man' entirely," says a Western scholar in Beijing. "They don't want to concede that China, or the party, has completely left socialism."

Yet the pace of change in China makes the task a daunting one.

The Chinese have pursued the "get rich" goal hammer and tongs, if not hammer and sickle. Last year the country recorded the sale of 2.4 million autos. This week at a much-talked about luxury auto show in Beijing, James Wang, a 27-year old sporting-goods supplier purchased a $900,000 stretch limo.

"The message that sends out is that you are only someone if you have money and power," one long time Beijing resident argues.

Concern over a "money at any cost" mentality has surfaced in a spate of public health stories here about food and milk supplemented with cheap additives in order to make an extra profit.

Some critics say that in some modern states the moral regulation Chinese leaders wish to reinforce often emerges from the society itself. Yet in China there has rarely been independent mediating structures between the people and the state, the kind of diverse voluntary organizations that make up civil society. A new mercantile class in China may be rising. But the cohort is small.For the time being, the party itself mandates the "ideological morals" needed, to use the phrase given by Premier Wen Jiabao this spring.

Other mandates this spring: Colleges are requiring students to sign oaths stating they won't cheat. Provincial party leaders must identify "model" behavior - the best athletes, students, workers, colleagues, and so on.

TV hosts in China in April were told they could no longer dye their hair any color but black. Public figures have been urged to cease using verbal expressions popular in Hong Kong and Taiwan, including words like "OK" or "bye bye" - that are also in widespread use on the mainland.

In Shanghai, six local news bureaus were shut and several journalists dismissed in an effort to avoid what one editor described as "too many sensitive stories." In Beijing in May, some 4,000 journalists from Xinhua and journalism students from local colleges were required to attend a meeting announced the same day. The message as told by one attendee: "We were reminded that no matter whom we worked for, we were still Chinese, that we owed our jobs to the nation."

[xuechengfeng]

Would it be out of line to suggest that severe social repression is the reason that there are these disturbing examples of juvenile crimes?

[xiaozhu]

I agree that such stress and restriction of action will cause negative reactions in some...makes you wonder why such stuff is almost common in apparently free countries like the USA.

[xuechengfeng]

Because they are on the exact opposite end of the spectrum, with the most freedom. There needs to be a meeting point between excess freedom and severe repression.

[skylee]

I think it is a natural process that when a people/place is poor, they get greedy and value "money" a lot. Then when they get richer, they acquire styles, and want even more money. Then they start to stumble even with all the money they have because economic bubbles burst, illnesses like AIDS and SARS strike, terrorists attack. AND THEN, with their generally improved living standards, they realize that there are other things in life that are just as valuable as money, such as their family, health, clean living, better environment etc.

IMHO China is still at the initial stages (think maslow's pyramid), and in fact many regions are still not rich. It may be too early to push other values. (My friends and I were joking the other day that we were still at the "safety needs" level.)

Ah why does the Chinese government want to control everything? Why does it think that stopping the flow of information would improve the quality of its people?

[roddy]

[annoying admin message]Could you read this re copying and pasting entire articles [/annoying admin message]

[chengdude]

From 21st Century Online, here is arguably another front upon which this campaign is being waged:

http://tinyurl.com/2csne

[sunyata]

hmm, very interesting...

Personally, I don't see these campaigns as something negative. I think the issues they address are all very relevant and important to China's future. Propaganda and information control are not always bad. However, I agree that such efforts probably won't be very fruitful...

[Guest Yau]

sunyata, everything has good sides and bad sides. Peeing from a jumping board to a swimming pool is also good for answering the natural call, but nobody does it---- it's just stupid.

Well, for china, the censorship should be only good for creating more jobs, healing the dangerous unemployment rate.

[sunyata]

Well, Yau, what exactly are you opposed to in these campaigns? Freedom of speech? I am not quite sure what you meant by your wonderul metaphor...

Will you only be pleased with Mainland, if it is identical to HK?

Is this what Mainland is missing?

Personally, I think it is good that China is taking steps to differentiate itself from HK, Taiwan and western cultural influence in general.

I agree that some of the steps taken by the government may be a bit extreme, but they are not completely unreasonable.

[talpa]

. . . I mean . . . you wouln't have found Lei Feng with green hair now would you? . . . kids these days . . . I dont know what its all coming to. . .

[wushijiao]

No dying of hair on TV, eh?....so we can now see how grey and old the CCP is?

[shibo77]

(My friends and I were joking the other day that we were still at the "safety needs" level.)

Right.... and I'm stuck on stage three....

I don't really like today's trend in China, sure the economic gains are great, but I had thought that the socialist nature and conservative nature of China might be beneficial in the long run for political stability, careful economic planning, urban planning, social welfare, less crime, low divorce rate, no prostitution, low AIDS rate, small population growth and so on...

But it seems that with all the gains of capitalism, the negative side has been taken on as well. Mimicking others, "向外", and the once feverously proud Chinese are now looking more and more into the already developped nations and their trends, Korea, Japan, green hair...

It seems that one is nothing if one can't utter a proper English sentence, or have studied abroad...

Personally, I have nothing against people dyeing their hair, and a mouthful of proper English is a great achievement. But it has become something of a status symbol, almost trying to distinguish ourselves from "non-educated

rural farmers with no English and no green hair..." The society I feel, at least in Beijing, and I'm sure it's probably the same in the other cities as well, that people are divided into an invisible tier. Not much different from a caste system... To be in a higher caste, you have to have these status symbols, jeans, Nikes, green hair, handy phone, a car, a business, English, Japanese, and a few other "coole" languages. Listening to strange noises they call music, when they don't even know what all the singing is about. I'm sure that these people wouldn't bother to befriend a poor rural farmer in one of their trips...

People with their newfound gains are losing their traditional Chinese morals, be it confucian, daoist, or buddhist... Turning exceedingly hollow... realy a shame.

Just my thought.

-Shibo

"you just gotta have green hair..."

[Amdir_Flassion]

People with their newfound gains are losing their traditional Chinese morals, be it confucian, daoist, or buddhist... Turning exceedingly hollow... realy a shame.

I certainly agree. Though not a Chinese national but an ethnic Chinese myself in Aus, I find myself having more traditional Chinese values and morals than many overseas students from China. Lots of them just spend money just because their folks give it to them, but don't think where it's from..... it's prob coz of fashion and pop-culture trends that Asian youth in general seem to be more hooked onto, leading them to just spend spend spend and consume.

I have friends from mainland China and Taiwan who change mobile phones every month, and in Aus, they don't come cheap.

It's frightening, and something I should say not only happening to Chinese but also to the youth in general around the world - the youth in more developed countries, to be more precise, in becoming more consumption-driven.

I think this (excessive consumerism and materialism) is a global problem, not just a Chinese problem, and something that all countries should work together to address this.

[sunyata]

agree completely with both Shibo and Amdir_Flassion