Shenzhen, indeed, is a good place to look for pioneers of China’s new blitzed-out fringe culture. The once sleepy fishing village across the border from Hong Kong has become a center of China’s capitalist experiments and growing prosperity. But the city’s shining skyscrapers now stand in a landscape of idled cranes and abandoned developments–casualties of the current economic downturn. As communist ideology has crumbled, the city has become known for rampant corruption, lawlessness and sleaze. For Worm and his friends, the future seems to be one of greed, selfishness, loveless sex and loneliness. Ideals have no value. “That stuff is bulls–t,” he says. “Why do people think that life should have meaning?”
What happened? Ten years ago the students on the streets of Beijing, calling for democracy and a cleaner government, were heartbreakingly idealistic. They were in love with America, struggling to absorb everything they could of the West, desperate to be part of the changes that were sweeping China. But after the bloody crackdown of June 4, the dreams of a generation died. The government made a cynical pact with the people: you’re free to get rich, but stay out of politics. Most young people accepted the bargain and now struggle to get into university and find good jobs. But in an ideological vacuum, society has become unhinged at the fringes as a rudderless generation searches for a new identity. Optimists think they can see the beginnings of a society that is more tolerant, individualistic and less in thrall to a herd instinct and dictates from above. Maybe, but it’s just as easy to find young China’s darker side.
Alienation, in fact, has become a growth business. Punk rock, the sound of disaffected youth, has become one of the hottest alternative trends in urban China. Every kid knows that to get ahead in business, you have to have connections. One popular new song catches the mood: “The people are very poor, but the Bank of China is rich. Let’s get it, get it, get it!” “It’s a direct way of showing rebelliousness,” says Hao Fang, 35, an author and bookstore owner. “In school, they might be criticized for rebelling, but in punk music, it’s OK.” Hao’s biography of Kurt Cobain, the late grunge-rock icon, sold 30,000 copies–in China, real numbers. Hao attributes the book’s success to the tremendous pressure young Chinese face from politically disillusioned parents, who want them to take safe, predictable jobs. The Cobain biography, says Hao, shows that “there are other choices in life.” (Cobain’s choice, as it happens, was suicide.)
Xiao Rong knows the appeal of the crooked path. The grandson of a close associate of former prime minister Zhou Enlai, Xiao went to a special school for children of the party elite. He says he used to get beaten up by his equally privileged classmates, and remembers the place with disgust. Now 20, Xiao has become the lead singer in one of Beijing’s many punk bands, Brain Failure. He sports an orange and red mohawk, a sleeveless denim jacket, high-top sneakers and a black leather choker with silver spikes. Xiao colors his Chinese and English with graphic obscenities, and is particularly enraged by the “dirty business” of police corruption. “Everyone knows the communists are f—ing B.S.! They took away my mother’s and father’s minds,” says this son of the party.
Youthful anger takes softer forms as well. At Hao’s bookstore, the hottest sellers are those staples of youthful rebellion, J. D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye” and Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road.” A counterculture Shanghai writer, Mian Mian, a reformed heroin addict herself, recently wrote a book of short stories called “La La La,” which describes a drugged-out nightclub world across China of bad relationships and loose sex. In one story, the narrator celebrates the fact that her one-night stand disappeared the next morning, never to be seen again. “He was the best I had,” she says.
In post-Tiananmen China, it’s easy to think that selfishness rules. “Sex is really casual these days,” says Gao Shen, 26, a former theater student who quit her advertising job and now hangs out in Beijing’s smoky bars. “People have lots of boyfriends, but they don’t know what love is.” In the theaters, she says, cell phones jangle throughout performances. “It used to be a way to show status,” says Gao. “Nowadays, these people don’t even realize anybody else exists.”
Literally, in some cases. Zhang Yadong lives in a twilight world, waking around 2 p.m. and going to bed at dawn. “I want nothing to do with practical things,” says Zhang, 30, a long-haired former cellist who produces pop music for money and Talking Heads-style pieces for himself. “People feel they have to be fake,” he says. “They say things, but they don’t talk to each other. If you’re too honest, you’ll be considered a stupid fool.” Looking back, many young Chinese find that nothing looks more foolish than the student idealism of a decade ago. “I don’t want to be a savior,” says Zhang. “I just live.”
China’s night life thrives on escapism. For a while heroin was the drug of choice among the newly prosperous; now it’s ecstasy’s turn. At Hot Spot, one of Beijing’s popular discos, students blow off steam by popping E and dancing to techno. Around midnight, two dancers, a woman clad in a red leather bikini and a man in a G-string and gauze cape, appear in metal cages and begin to thrust and lunge. She slides up and down a pole. “It’s fun,” says Xu Yang, 20, the dancer, painted in heavy blue eye shadow and long false lashes. Xu hasn’t ever really thought about politics or the student movement of 1989. “I guess their teachers must have led them astray or something,” she says with a shrug.
To many older Chinese, today’s empty youth culture is depressing. “This is a big step backward,” says Zhang Hongkai, 46, manager of the Hot Spot disco, and Xu’s boss. He says his young customers just want drugs and money. “Young people just say, ‘Who cares?’ That’s exactly what the government wants to see.” Yet to others, the generation gap itself is an encouraging sign of a growing sense of individualism among Chinese youths. “Don’t you see that this is progress?” says writer Hao. “Sure, if you compare this to a healthy society, it doesn’t look good; but if you compare this to what we had before, it’s huge progress. Before, we didn’t have ‘I.’ We only had ‘we’.” In Hao’s view, individualism is the first step toward a healthy democratic society.
Few Chinese struggle with the new freedoms more poignantly than the “rabbits,” or transsexuals, who travel from city to city, performing in gay bars. At a tiny, smoke-filled joint in Beijing, Mary, a 29-year-old former male model, is wearing a blond wig, a sparkly minidress and spike heels. Mary left home in an industrial region of northern China to form a dance troupe and go on tour. Tonight he croons a lewd, vaudeville-type song, to the roars of the mostly gay male audience. “My parents didn’t used to know what I do, but now they do,” Mary says coldly. “What can they say? I make 10 times more money than they do in the factory.”
They may not like the messenger, but that’s what China’s leaders want to hear. Though homosexuality is still taboo, these days the authorities offer gays essentially the same deal as all Chinese–do what you want, but stay out of politics. In a bathhouse in the Qianmen district of Beijing, dozens of men lie on a long platform in the darkness and have sex with multiple strangers. Yet a certain sadness lurks beneath the anything-goes atmosphere. Usually, says Dream Road, another rabbit in Mary’s troupe, the bathhouse patrons don’t bother with condoms, despite the threat of AIDS. And while Dream Road says he would like to escape his cabaret life to set up a business, he admits to darker dreams as well. At 31, this son of an unemployed textile worker in Harbin says he has no future. “Sometimes I think about killing myself,” he says, and adds, only half-joking, “Can you find me a pretty foreign boyfriend?”
Despite the mood of alienation, national pride, if anything, has grown among young Chinese. Frustration could easily turn outward in the form of nationalism. The recent NATO bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, which sparked demonstrations in Beijing, stirred even punk rocker Xiao out of his angry apathy. “We may not have human rights,” he says, “but this is no longer the Ching dynasty. Don’t call us the Sick Man of Asia.” Between obscenities, Xiao lets on that he loves China, after all. “I want to do something for my country,” he says, “not for my government.”
That distinction would have escaped many earlier generations. In China, the writ of the emperor–or chairman–ran everywhere; nonconformity was antisocial. So maybe casual sex, punk rock and caged go-go dancers amount to progress. At least on the fringes, the Chinese don’t want to be led, and they are standing on their own, independent feet. In Shenzhen, Worm and his gang see the recent anti-U.S. rallies as an event staged by Beijing. They’re after a “deviant” identity; they hate anything that has official approval or high-minded purpose. One friend of Worm’s who was “fed up with his life” walked into the middle of an intersection one night recently and started directing traffic. Another risked the death penalty by returning from a trip to Scandinavia with a bundle of illicit drugs, wrapped in plastic and doused in perfume to put off the police dogs. “You’ve got to be weird,” says Worm. “You’ve got to fight against living your life like it is a routine.” It isn’t what they were saying in 1989, but it might be the beginning of a new society.
