Book Review: Youth Culture in China: From Red Guards to Netizens

This book by Paul Clark takes on the project of weaving a complex argument about the continuities and discontinuities between Chinese youth and youth in the West, between youth and other demographic groups in China and between Chinese youth in the past and the present. These multiple comparison points make it a somewhat ambitious project, but no one can accuse Clark of being stingy with supporting resources. The book is densely packed with an impressive array of sources, from academic studies and research reports, which paint the broader contextual brushstrokes, to films and photographs that bring out the shades of the personal and intimate which constitute larger social patterns. There are moments when the argument is in danger of being obscured by both the sheer number of detailed examples as well as the many threads of said argument. However, this is only a minor quibble about a book that has significant interdisciplinary value. It is also perhaps inevitable that some aspects of the project have to be compromised as a result of the competition for authorial attention between the integrity of the local narratives and the synoptic gaze of the global perspective, overlaid by the attempt to plot a non-deterministic historical trajectory.

The work that results bears the marks of these decisions and embodies the complexities of its subject. To begin with, the structure of the book can be confusing, moving as it does between spaces and times in no immediately discernible pattern. One only needs to look at the contents page for this impression of randomness to form. Closer reading, however, reveals a rhythm akin to syncopation, with each chapter touching on all the historical moments, dealing with both the local and the global, involving a multitude of cultural trends and artefacts related to the themes of space, bodies and rhythms and yet zooming in on one distinct permutation of these entities at a time.

Clark attempts to provide a justification for the choice of three ‘historical moments’ in China’s history for the examination of youth culture development, and especially for the selection of the Cultural Revolution as a starting point. There is nothing self-evident about this choice, from the point of view of either historical or subcultural exclusivity. Chinese stories told over generations highlight qualities and obligations of youth (see for example Ma & Lau 1986), and youth was valorized by Mao. However, Clark posits that the instrumental and ideological fetishism of youth prior to the Cultural Revolution was focused on youth as adults-in-training rather than a demographic with the space to express a distinctive identity. The removal of young people in large groups from the direct supervision of parents and other authority figures, he argues, provided the autonomy needed for creative expression.

There is significant contestation among scholars as to the validity of subcultural theory on the basis of its neglect of structural determinants (Bennett 1999), and even where the cultural premise is accepted, uncritical applications of the theory have had wider implications related to the pathologization or fetishization of youth practices. While Clark locates his work in the cultural studies field, he does not shy away from engaging with the lager social processes that shape the subcultures he argues for, implicitly echoing Gunster’s (2004) view on the convergence of commodity and culture even as he weaves a more nuanced narrative of individual and group identity. The argument that emerges is one that springs from the concept of subcultures, but does not tie itself to any polemic rhetoric on youth. Clark thus sets up loose connections with multiple disciplines and then leaves himself free to engage deeply with the artefacts of modern Chinese culture with which he demonstrates a reassuring familiarity. The reader coming from a particular discipline such as media studies, sociology or history may hope for a more detailed engagement with scholarly debates in these fields, but that is not something that Clark claims to provide. This is above all else a work on China.

The first historical moment is thus 1968, during the Cultural Revolution, when young people first started being sent out into the countryside from the cities to ‘learn from the peasants’. This removed them from traditional adult supervision, brought them together in large groups, infused them with both a sense of purpose as well as alienation and, in general, created the ideal conditions (according to Clark) for the development of a distinct youth subculture. In addition, technologies such as cameras for photography and projectors for film-based propaganda work played a significant role, in Clark’s analysis, of the creation of spaces for young people to assert a distinctive identity. This set the stage for the second historical moment of 1988, a point which Clark argues embodies the complex interplay of global influences and local trends through the growth of the movie and television industry and the evolution of the rock music scene. The focus zooms in both metaphorically and literally on the creation of rhythms of youth through media phenomena such as the movie Red Sorghum, the appeal of rocker Cui Jian, the Korean Wave and the Supergirl song contest. Along with the metaphor of rhythm, Clark weaves in an analysis of how the focus on the physical body and its presentation is implicated in the expression of youth identity and increasingly more so approaching the third historical moment of 2008, associated with the Beijing Olympic Games and the Internet age. In an ironic twist that belies much of the rhetoric about the virtual/physical binary associated with new media, Clark (2012, p. 101) states that:

By the twenty-first century the body focus of Chinese youth had shifted from the androgyny of the Cultural Revolution, through celebration of manly vigour and refusal to bow to authority, to a more complex, in many ways highly sexualised, concept. As with the rhythms and spaces of youth culture, new technologies and media were instrumental in shaping these changes.

The new technology of the Internet, Clark argues, has led to the rise of a subculture that grew out of the rhythms and spaces of the past, but has also introduced new elements that interact in increasingly complex ways with the wider world beyond China. This globalized sphere has in turn shaped more localized expressions of youth identity, rooted in past youth cultures as well as present contexts. Yet Clark stops short of defending the notion of young Chinese netizens as a distinct subcultural group as strenuously as he argues for earlier youth-exclusive identities. For one thing, he posits, the Internet has opened up spaces for all demographics to express their opinions about common issues in less filtered environments. For another, the Internet has been associated with the dawn of a more transnational type of modernity, one in which ‘the nation had become too large and too small to take care of the various issues of globalization’ (Clark 2012, p. 197). Chinese youth culture, Clark concludes, bears similarities to and differences from modern youth cultures in other parts of the world, as well as older, perhaps more distinctive, youth cultures in recent Chinese history. In the final analysis: ‘Clandestine group songs, cheeky T-shirts, shouted folk-inspired anthems and clever word play shared with thousands in a virtual space were all expressions of youthful weariness that did not challenge the political status quo, merely underscored its potential irrelevance’ (Clark 2012, p. 199).

This would appear to describe much of the democratic participation associated with the Internet around the world today, with similarly muted political goals and Clark’s work on China (and other similar culturally grounded studies) might hold some lessons about the scope for political efficacy in modern democracies where the Internet is increasingly evolving into a somewhat problematic public sphere (Hindman 2009) that facilitates surveillance and algorithmic control of political communication and citizens are manipulated as consumers in a neoliberal age (Miller 2007; Morozov 2012).