Youth in China since the 1960s has been a site for complex interactions between and reworkings of local and international influences. Emerging in a period of relative national isolation and introspection, youth cultures established their power from an ability to serve a wide range of needs and expectations. In the space of four decades China’s young people seemed to have gone through a process that had taken several generations in Western Europe and North America. The kinds of expressions of sometimes alienated youth identity that emerged in Western societies from at least the 1930s became common in China in half a generation. This study has tried to show that expressions of youth identity and their social impact took on distinctly China-based characteristics. Former Red Guards became the managers and promoters of rock bands in the 1980s, providing a new soundtrack to lives undergoing rapid change as the economy grew by ten percent each year in the subsequent decades. But these transformations in the lives of all Chinese, including youth, cannot be understood through mapping phenomena according to grid patterns of simple binaries: Chinese and Western, local and global, or traditional and modern. The developments were more complex and also spontaneous, ungoverned, uneven, and unpredictable. An assumed teleology from local to global is misleading, as Chinese elements coexisted and intermingled with the international and were transformed and reinvented. In short, Chinese youth cultures emerged, grew, and were elaborated by a myriad of influences large and small. This was their strength and attraction to participants.

Echoes across Five Decades

Looking at this study’s forty years, covering five decades, many continuities, links, and echoes are obvious. The importance of performance to Chinese young people, their creativity in even the most constrained circumstances, and their attachment to heroes or idols connect the three time nodes that we have used. Performing loyalty dances to Chairman Mao or their own reworkings of the official cultural canon gave Red Guards and sent-down youth a sense of solidarity and purpose. Dancing, body building, and enjoying the new-style music had performative aspects in the 1980s. By the twenty-first century, the Internet opened a stage for netizens to present themselves (or a version of themselves) to a wide (or narrow) audience.