Generation gaps widen as Chinese lifestyles change

I have a Chinese colleague who studied in New York during the 1990s and has fond memories of day trips to the Hamptons, lounging in East Village coffee shops and spending the bloom of her youth in a new and exciting city. So, when we had some downtime once during a business trip to the Big Apple, she was eager to relive her past.

After our meetings were finished and the rest of our colleagues were preparing for their ninth consecutive Chinese meal, we called a cab and revisited her old haunts. Although nearly 20 years had passed, she could recognize the landmarks: "That's the coffee shop I used to read in although another one is now a flower shop."

Another friend, a government official, also visited New York in the 1990s and held it in awe. The city, she said, was everything the newly open Chinese cities aspired to be. She returned last year eager to recapture that same feeling, but even though she found New York almost as she had left it, just older and more tired, the feeling was elusive. After experiencing China's dynamism, New York left her disappointed.

In Mandarin, the expression wushirenfei means that although things stay the same, people don't. China's rapid economic development has almost reversed this expression. In modern China, things are in a constant state of flux and the people are struggling to keep up.

Beijing has become a city of juxtaposition. Migrant workers nap on the lawns outside the Bird's Nest, straw hats hanging over their eyes to keep out the noonday sun. Old Beijing men, their hutong and bathhouses demolished, take long, rambling walks after dinner through gentrifying neighborhoods they scarcely recognize.

Architects who would otherwise sit idle in Manhattan are double or even triple booked in Shanghai, given a blank check to build as much and as high and as avant-garde as they please.

The rapid changes have left their mark not just on the skyline but also on the Chinese people. In the United States, various generations often have more similarities than differences. Although those who lived through the Great Depression bear the scars of that era, broadly speaking generational divisions are less urgent than other fault lines, such as class, race and religion.

In China, however, development has pushed each generation further away from the one before it, giving the term "generation gap" a resonance it lacks in the West.

China's economy is growing almost five times faster than the West's. What would take a decade to complete in the West, China races through in two years.

A Chinese generational label is powerful because in three characters it captures the defining shared experiences of an era.

Where post-1960s evokes the image of a child growing up with seven brothers and sisters in a courtyard house, riding his bike and causing mischief, post-1980s suggests no siblings, no rations and possibly no house.

When the post-1990s generation complains that parents are outdated, they are essentially saying that the China they're growing up in is not the same as the one as their predecessors grew up in.

More than anything else, time is the sharpest divider. Generation gaps will narrow as the pace of China's economic growth, and the social changes that brings, level off. Nonetheless, they will never close.

From antiquity, Chinese have bemoaned renxinbugu, that public morals are not what they used to be. Elders have always begrudged youth. The post-1990s generation is a convenient whipping boy because it's too young to defend itself but not yet old enough to attack the post-2000s generation.

Ultimately, a generation gap is a luxurious problem. China is fortunate that the new generation can enjoy what the old one couldn't, even if it estranges them.

Although the term "may you live in interesting times" is ostensibly a curse in Chinese, it's better to be cursed with progress and the adjustment it entails, than blessed with the alternative.

The author works at a Chinese private equity firm.

For China Daily