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China's 'lost generation' coddles its young
Duan Xingmei, a retired teacher, spent her teenage years discussing Mao Zedong and pulling a plow through the cornfields. With her comrades, she recited slogans, fought hunger and worked like a draft animal in the name of China's Great Cultural Revolution. Duan's daughter, Zhou Jie, spent her teens studying computer science and English, then finished off with some courses in fashion design. Tuition and expenses were footed by mom and dad. Her parents gave her a computer in her first year at college and a cell phone in her third year. She has never lacked for anything and knows almost nothing of the upheaval and want that her mother lived through during China's political frenzy of the late 1960s and early 1970s. "She has told me very little, very little," said Zhou, 24, who works in customer relations at a Nanjing clothing company that exports stylish jeans to Italy. "She just says it was very hard." As a growing economy produces new wealth and a spreading middle class in China, the epochal Cultural Revolution has receded to the distant past in just one generation. The millions of urban youths who were forced to abandon their books and live their teenage years with peasants, have grown into indulgent middle-aged parents, eager to spare their children not only the deprivation, but even the knowledge of what happened during those tumultuous years. "That special period of history ruined many parents' golden years," said Sun Xiaoyun, deputy director of the Youth and Children Research Center, in a report on China's particular generation gap. "Their dreams were blown away. So they tend to place all their hopes on the next generation." Partly out of embarrassment that they were part of such a discredited political experiment, parents from what has been called the Lost Generation have turned their offspring into the Coddled Generation. In the process, whatever lessons were to be learned from the political madness that seized China then have largely been lost on today's students, who have grown up taking stability and economic well-being for granted. "Nowadays our life is so much better, so my mother doesn't like to talk about the past, because it was so terrible," said Zhou, whose $200 MP3 music player dangled from her neck across a trendy high turtleneck and onto a stylishly tailored jacket. Duan, 54, said in an interview that she often tried to tell her daughter what she went through, but that it never sank in. "She just doesn't seem to believe it," Duan said, adding: "Our generation was not very lucky." Chair Mao launched the Great Cultural Revolution in 1966 with the goal of renewing China's revolutionary spirit after several years of moderate economic policies. Teenagers, particularly those from wealthy or intellectual families, were forced to leave cities and live with farmers, sharing their hard lives and, it was hoped, gaining new insight into the Maoist revolution. Red Guards, meanwhile, took over schools and universities, substituting political criteria for academic achievement. Millions of lives were smashed in the resulting chaos. Now that they are parents, those who were caught up in the turmoil have displayed unshakeable determination to see their children live more enjoyable lives by using the opportunities available since China opened to the world and adopted market reforms under Deng Xiaoping in the early 1980s. Tian Shi, 50, the son of a doctor and grandson of a landowner, was sent to a military camp just below the Russian border, where he spent his entire adolescence. Although far from rich, he recently forked over nearly $400 for a cell phone for his 14-year-old daughter, who spent her last vacation in Australia perfecting her English. Tian's older sister, Lu Jiang, 53, spent seven years on a flea-ridden farm
planting crops and slopping pigs. Her son Ha Li, who graduated from Shandong
University, all expenses paid, has gone on to graduate studies in computer
science at the University of Paris, where he receives regular cash infusions
from his parents.
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