Post 70s, Post 80s, Post 90s - how does it work?

[wannabechinaman]

I have heard that rather than having 15-20 year long generations like we have in the States, China tends to classify generations by what decade you were born in.

Here in America, people born from after the end of the War in 1945 up to '63ish are Baby Boomers, mid 60s to mid-late 1970s are Generation X, people from about 1979 to the mid 90s are Generation Y, and the little kids born from the late 90s/early 00s onwards are Generation Z. I wouldn't be surprised if the babies born now are a generation even beyond that.

It seems kind of arbitrary to cut off generations by decades, but I guess China is changing so fast, that it makes a degree of sense. Still, is someone born in December of 1989 more similar to someone who is nearly 10 years older than them than they are to a class mate born in March of 1990 who graduated in the same year?

I would imagine that a rural 20 year old resident of Gansu Province born in 1993 would have had a more hardscrabble old fashioned life than a 26 year old Beijinger born in 1987. So surely, the generations are not necessarily so clear cut?

Is everyone born in 1990 kissy faced, brain-disabled and "Martian" while nobody born in 1989 is?

[imron]

It seems kind of arbitrary to cut off generations by decades

You mean as opposed to arbitrarily choosing some random year like what happens in the West?

[skylee]

Here in America, people born from after the end of the War in 1945 up to '63ish are Baby Boomers,

It seems kind of arbitrary to cut off generations by decades, but I guess China is changing so fast, that it makes a degree of sense. Still, is someone born in December of 1989 more similar to someone who is nearly 10 years older than them than they are to a class mate born in March of 1990 who graduated in the same year?

Is grouping people born in 1945 and people born in December 1963 in the "baby-boomers" category any different?

[Ruben von Zwack]

It seems kind of arbitrary to cut off generations by decades

But we do that in Europe, too.

I don't find it that arbitrary. It means you will have listened to the same music on the radio when you were small and easily impressed, and eaten the same artificial flavours and colours that are illegal now in food

That's a lot in common, in my opinion!

[Guest realmayo]

I agree with the OP: the Chinese way is more arbitrary.

They say: here is a 10-year period, we'll label it with the characteristics relevant to the majority of people captured within that period.

The western way (if there is one) is to say: plenty of people share certain characteristics, and the years 1966-1978 (say) are most relevant to that.

A bit like deciding whether summer is (a) a defined three-month period, the dates same every year; or (b) the period of the year when it's usually warmest, after Spring has sprung but before the leaves start turning brown.

Is grouping people born in 1945 and people born in December 1963 in the "baby-boomers" category any different?

Yes, it's different. The dates aren't chosen because they're neat and tidy, but because they are when the baby boom took place.

Anyone know if it's a Communist thing or a Chinese thing? I can see it being hard to talk about "the Great Leap Forward/Famine" generation, or the "Red Guards" generation. Even something like "post-Mao" might be troublesome if Party legitimacy still partly derives from him? So maybe it's more convenient to use dates and have the real meaning more oblique?

[abcdefg]

Here the system is simple: People refer to themselves and their friends as 八零后 meaning the 80's generation and 九零后 for the 90's generation. Don't think I've ever heard 七零后 used.

[Lu]

...is someone born in December of 1989 more similar to someone who is nearly 10 years older than them than they are to a class mate born in March of 1990 who graduated in the same year?

...surely, the generations are not necessarily so clear cut?

Surely these are rhetorical questions? Of course you can't make a clear cut in which someone born on December 31, 1989 is completely different from someone born a day later. The same goes for American generations. And of course people in rural areas have completely different experiences from people from the cities, even if they're born on the same day. Much as someone born in 1943 can still kinda be part of the generation of babyboomers, and much as not all babyboomers or Generation Y-ers are the same.

And the West does love to count in decades. Everyone knows what eighties music is, or what the sixties were. We just count by when people were in their teens instead of by when they were born.

[imron]

Don't think I've ever heard 七零后 used.

I've heard it, used it and been called it.

[gato]

The 80后 generation came of age after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacres. Most of them don't have any memories of the 1989 events.

The 90后 generation came of age after China's entry into the WTO and advent of Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics.

There are definitely common ties within these generations. Maybe there is something to what realmayo said, that it would be too politically sensitive to call these generations by other names.

[msittig]

Yes, I don't see why we should use hard limits. Can't we describe generations in terms of normal distributions, described by their means and standard deviation? Or t-distributions, or Poisson or χ²-distributions?

Like, "I'm from the N(1995.0,7.4) generation; you know, kissy faced, brain-disabled and Martian!".

But seriously I'd go with realmayo's answer too, too politically sensitive. Plus Chinese like numbers.

[Johnny20270]

In UK we classify ourselves as 80’s, 90s, noughties generation. It’s not the decade you were born in but generally your teenage years, so music, clothes, and technology were major impacts on your life. Of course everybody thinks there generation was the best

However, they are wrong! :lol: The 80’s were the best! 12” vinyl, tapes rather than CD’s, blokes had mullets and used hairspray, stone washed Jeans, A-Team, bands that wrote their own songs and weren’t full of pretty boys, 20pence bought you sweets, everyone wanted a Swiss army knife like MacGyver, Darth Vader and Bruce Lee were seriously cool, Big Arnie made proper 18cert movies, people knew Kylie as Charlene, board games rather than PC games unless you were rich and you got Pacman, a PC could only be a ZX spectrum or Commodore 32/64, transformers was a toy and only way you could complete a rubix cube was to smash it open and reassemble it

[Ruben von Zwack]

Honestly I think the Americans are the ones who are doing it "differently" and not the Chinese (and the rest of the world). The only generation name we have in Germany is "68er", or, meanwhile, "Alt-68er" (old 68-ers) and it's not quite, but almost a derogatory term, for people whose mind is stuck way back then.

bands that wrote their own songs and weren’t full of pretty boys

Err... are you saying Milli Vanilli or Vanilla Ice or Bros were admired for their musical talent?

[wannabechinaman]

The generations in the West aren't clear cut, and there are a lot of different dates used. Even the Baby Boomers have different dates - for example some say they should begin as early as 1940 or 1943, or end as early as 1956 or 1960.

It just doesn't really make much sense to me to define a generation by the decade somebody is born in. Like somebody else said, I think it's more defined by what era you grew up in. Someone born in 1980 is old enough to remember before Tiananmen, someone born in 1987 is not, ditto with a person born in 1990 remembering before Capitalism w Chinese characteristics while someone born in 1997 can't.

[wannabechinaman]

Also, I'd argue in a way that even decades aren't that clear cut. A lot of the "hippie" stuff of the 60s spelled into the early 1970s, and a lot of the fashion and music that was typical of the 80s was still common up to about 1992.

And I can't even fully articulate how the 00s and 10s are different from the 90s.

[Guest realmayo]

I could be wrong about how these are used in China. But isn't it the case the Chinese numbers are telling you more what the people are like, while the UK equivalents are telling what the time was like? Slight difference of emphasis?

[Guest realmayo]

I was told:

70后 - if you got into university you were super lucky, big head start on everyone else, life quite easy

80后 - plenty more people going to university but your degree still meant you stood out quite a bit -- okay to fnd a job

90后 - way too many people at university, when you start looking for a job almost everyone has a degree, life is tough

00后 - forgettaboutit!

[gato]

70后 - 10% with bachelor's degree, 1% with Master's, 0.001% with PhDs

80后 - 60% with bachelor's, 20% with Master's, 1% with PhDs

90后 - 90% with bachelor's, 40% with Master's, 5% with PhDs?

00后 - 99% with bachelor's, 80%with Master's, 20% with PhDs?

[liuzhou]

only way you could complete a rubix cube was to smash it open and reassemble it

Nah! You could peel all the coloured stickers off and then stick them back on again.

[heifeng]

Under the 80后 category, you can add this reference article which was linked at post # 6 on this thread: Semi-academic books on Chinese society

The balinghou: Chinese parents bemoan their children’s laziness and greed, but this generation of young people has had enough

www.aeonmagazine.com/living-together/james-palmer-chinese-youth/

What I actually find more interesting & which futher subdivides groups is the X二代 labeling.

There is (off the top of my head) 富二代，官二代，农二代.....& many more (oh, look, see here ~or~ 快速链接： 房二代 文二代 独二代 富二代 官二代 拼二代 权二代 星二代 贫二代 二代移民 新生代农民工 蛇二代)...

[Angelina]

Don't forget the marriageability, a single 八零后 girl is a 剩女. Any single 七零后 is past her/his marriageable age according to the people who like to gossip.

The whole concept of 剩女 is terrible and deserves a separate topic.