Sex, Culture and Modernity in China

6. The Cultural Construction of 'Youth'

6 THE CULTURAL CONSTRUCTION OF 'YOUTH' THE EMERGENCE OF 'YOUTH' If biologizing discourses in Republican China ascribed new meanings to the categories of 'manhood' and 'womanhood', the invention of 'youth' as a social category was also important. 'Youth' or 'adolescence' is a historically contingent concept defined in different ways by different cultures.! Boundaries between 'childhood' and 'youth' have often been blurred, and young people were not always thought to belong to a separate age of life with specific psychological characteristics. No strict legal or ritual boundary existed between children and adolescents in late imperial China, and they were classified as non-adults together with old and infirm people.2 The term qingnian ('youth') was restricted to males aged sixteen to thirty; it excluded girls, who were expected to marry as soon as they reached sexual maturity. During the late Qing, the term qingnian was increasingly used to describe young males from rich households.3 1 Philippe Aries, Centuries of childhood: A social history offamily life, New York: Vintage, 1962; Harry Hendrick, Images of youth: Age, class, and the male youth problem, 1880-1920, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990; for a critique of Aries, see Michael Mitterauer, A history of youth, London: Blackwell, 1992. 2 Derk Bodde, 'Age, youth and infirmity in the law of Ch'ing China', in Jerome A. Cohen, R. Randle Edwards and Fu-mei Chang Chen (eds), Essays on China's legal tradition, Princeton University Press, 1980, pp.137-69; see also Ann Waltner, 'The moral status of the child in late imperial China: Childhood in ritual and in law', Social Research, 53, no.4 (winter 1986), pp.667-87. 3 Marion]. Levy, The family revolution in modern China, New York: Atheneum, 1949, pp.84-6. 146 THE EMERGENCE OF 'YOUTH' 147 A reflection of the rapid rise in social status and political power of young people, 'youth' became a widespread category of analysis in the wake of the New Culture Movement. The scope of 'youth' was universalized to encompass young women as well as young workers of the industrial sector,4 and distinct physiological and psychological features were now thought to characterize the 'adolescent' stage. Emotional turbulence, mental imbalance and accelerated physical growth were described as 'natural' processes of change. Couched in biomedical terms of 'impulses', 'instincts' and 'energy', the young person was portrayed as a bundle of passions that needed to be properly disciplined and guided through education. 'Youth' was also turned into a powerful symbol of regeneration , vitality and commitment to modernity: it was invented as standing for reason, progress and science. New professional groups in the urban centres, in particular the radical intellectuals and modernizing scientists, increasingly focused on 'oppressed youth' and 'oppressed women' as the two social groups which should be liberated from the bonds of Confucianism. Represented as the custodians of racial health, young people were claimed to have a right to develop freely and contribute to the building of the nation. 'Adolescence' became part of a programme of racial health. Based on the popular theory of recapitulation, 'youth' was seen as the birth of the individual, a turbulent stage of development marked by biological changes which would transform the young person into a mature adult. A 'period' (shidai) on the path to maturity, it was compared to the nation in an 'epoch' (shidai) on the way to a better future. s 4 New attitudes towards childhood, the emergence of the 'child' as a category of person, and the individualization of the child in China are important historical issues which remain to be analyzed; see Jon 1. Saari, Legacies of childhood: Growing up Chinese in a time ofcrisis, 1890-1920, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. 5 On a new mode of consciousness centred around the notion of 'period' or 'epoch' (shidai), see Sun Lung-kee, 'Out of the wilderness: Chinese intellectual odysseys from the "May Fourth" to the "Thirties''', Ph.D. thesis, Stanford University, 1985, p.9. See also Leo Ou-fan Lee, 'In search of 148 THE CULTURAL CONSTRUCTION OF 'YOUTH' In his 'Call to Youth' of 1915, Chen Duxiu compared adolescence to 'early spring, like the rising sun, like trees and grass in bud, like the newly sharpened blade. It is the most valuable period of life. The function of youth in society is the same as that of a fresh and vital cell in a human body. In the process of metabolism, the old and the...