In the five decades that are the focus of this study, the spaces in which Chinese youth expressed their evolving and distinctive identities changed and expanded considerably. From furtive group singing or reading of banned materials in the safety of a private space in a village or barracks, spaces for youth-driven activities extended to urban dance halls, parks, and gymnasiums in the 1980s. At the same time whole new imaginary spaces were constructed. We have seen how the film Red Sorghum created a fictional landscape on which teenaged men inscribed something of their own fantasies and ambitions. In the same decade a new style of fiction, labelled ‘hoodlum writing’ (liumang wenxue), reached readers, who saw in the hip, alienated, and amoral stories parallels with their own lives in a rapidly changing social context. The work of Wang Shuo in particular appealed to young readers and television watchers. By the mid-1990s a virtual space was beginning to open up, populated overwhelmingly by people under twenty-five years old. The Internet produced a vast expansion in the spaces available for the expression of youthful distinctiveness and shared values.

This chapter will discuss physical spaces before moving on to the imaginative spaces associated with the pen of Wang Shuo, then examine how television and film also opened up for youth unreachable spaces, real and imagined, historical and contemporary. The rise of youth Internet activity and the uses to which Chinese netizens put these virtual spaces will form the bulk of this chapter’s analysis. Several themes will reoccur that can be broadly grouped around the labels commodification, manipulation, and deterritorialisation. Youth idols emerged who were in part the creations of companies and organisations intent on selling the products and the ways of living and attitudes that youth perceived them to engender. The groups backing the new heroes may have had benign, even noncommercial intentions, but the ways in which these ‘products’ interacted with the youth ‘market’ represented a further commodification and manipulation of Chinese cultural production and consumption. I have suggested elsewhere that this strong linkage between culture and commodity was strengthened greatly in the perhaps unlikely circumstances of the Cultural Revolution.