As a time of intensified biological development, youth is characterised by an obsession with bodies: self-image, the discovery of sex, and the bodies of others. In the 1980s, with youth establishing unprecedented (at least since 1949) importance in Chinese society and public culture, bodies became a central focus of young Chinese. This chapter will trace the rise of the body focus and youth through a discussion of several youth cultural phenomena related to the body from the late 1980s into the twentieth century. Bodies had of course been important to young Chinese during the Cultural Revolution period discussed in the previous chapter. Notions about all Chinese clad in unisex, shapeless clothing in these years and denied any suggestion of sexual difference in the cultural products at the heart of the Cultural Revolution culture are clearly misplaced. Bodies and sexual difference featured in the eight so-called model performances, particularly in the two dance dramas. Ballet was hardly a place to ignore bodies. As we have seen, sent-down youth responded somewhat like young people everywhere in the relative absence of parental and other adult supervision. Much of the unofficial circulated fiction in those years featured salacious tales of love and betrayal acted out by handsome men and beautiful, worldly women.

But in the 1980s and later, as space opened up further for youthful expressions of identity and distinction, the body became a much more central feature of youth cultures in China as it was in Western countries. With the widening range of choices in entertainment and recreation, the rise of the body and sex in public discourse was obvious. Young people led the way in public demonstrations of the importance of the body, of fashion and appearance, of relationships, and of fandom. This chapter will examine the rise of the body among young people through several phenomena in public discourse in 1988 in particular. It will start with a film that celebrated physicality and with the interest in the nude body in art in the late 1980s.