Contemporary Chinese Youth and the State

HAVING PUT A VERY successful Olympics in the rearview mirror, China entered 2009 with a set of new challenges, brought on in part by the worldwide economic crisis and the resulting demands to ensure necessary employment levels and in part by the familiar issue ofmaintaining social stability.While the hope, presumably, was to move reasonably smoothly from the Olympics of August 2008 to the celebration of the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China in October 2009, the Chinese media has instead become proactive in alerting local officials and the general public that China is entering “a peak period for mass incidents” (quntixing shijian,群体性事件), with further warnings that a single national-level event, handled poorly, could “resonate” (gongzhen, 共振) into a threat to overall social stability and a serious political crisis. The timing is particularly sensitive because 2009 will also see the anniversaries of the May Fourth Movement (1919), the Tiananmen Square protests and the subsequent bloody military assault (April–June 4, 1989), and the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade by NATO forces, led by the United States (May 7, 1999). Each of these anniversaries is worrisome to China’s political leadership, albeit for different reasons, and each one has the potential to mobilize different segments of China’s youth population, including more than 6 million current-year university and college graduates, who will join those from 2008 who are still hunting for jobs. While the twentieth anniversary of what is now widely known as liu si (六四, or June 4), or “Tiananmen,” is likely to provoke a response from more liberal elements within the population, and appears to be of generally less interest to most youth today, the tenth