Li Jing dictated, wang Qianni sorted out excerpts
【Editor's Note】From May 22 to 23, the two-day conference "Youth as Historical and Ideological Topics" was held at the Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences of Peking University, which hoped to promote a deep understanding of the issues of young people in the history of the Chinese revolution in the 20th century and the history of modern and contemporary literature through the discussion of scholars from multiple disciplines such as literature, history, philosophy, and sociology.
This article is the speech of young scholar Li Jing in the roundtable discussion of the conference.
Event poster
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The theme of today's roundtable is "Youth as a historical topic and as a realistic subject", and our discussion has extended from the 1920s to the present, gradually focusing on the discussion of practical topics. I often encounter two ways of discussing contemporary youth issues: one is in life. I was born in 1989, and gatherings of my peers can easily turn into grievances and complaints, from work pressures to financial hardships, from interpersonal distress to health skills, full of insecurities, feelings of scarcity and anxiety. In the end, there will always be people who can't look at it anymore and jump out and say: Why hang your head in frustration, it will definitely get better and better in the future! Everyone will also agree, but then the whole conversation will also sail to the end, as if "getting better" is equivalent to an empty rest. The kings present harbored all kinds of worries and could not see the concrete picture of the "future".
I don't know from what day on, many of my peers around me no longer believe in the "struggle narrative" and "human narrative" accepted in the process of growing up. I remember a thunderous saying when I was a child, "You struggle for eighteen years, you can sit with others and drink coffee", and when you grow up, you find that "all roads lead to Rome, and some people live in Rome, they are born in Rome".
So such offline gatherings are mainly cathartic, of course, will also produce a temporary sense of connection, and then return to their respective predicaments.
Another way to touch on youth issues is the Internet. The youth group is the most important producer, communicator and audience of Internet culture, and it is also the most important consumer group in the e-commerce industry in the consumption era, so the focus of public opinion on the Internet is often around the youth, which is reasonable.
A very prominent phenomenon is that since the end of 2019, many online terms depicting the current situation of young people have gushed out, such as social animals, workers, inner volumes, "Houlang", "small town writers" and "985 waste", etc., and recently "lying flat learning". Today there is a new word: "cabbage" - no intention to participate in the inner roll, so it seems very dish.
These words "infect" each other on social media, becoming social fashion and flooding, gradually wearing away the original unsettling irony of these rhetoric and exposing the superficial reality, and turning them into light jokes. After all, when celebrities can call themselves "hit workers", the meaning of this word is completely nothing. It is undeniable that behind the popularity of these words there is a real collective situation and even unconscious, with a desire to locate and express themselves, but as Xiang Biao reminded, they reflect more of the middle class's fear of class downward movement. Flood of hot words can't really cut into our reality. Many times, it is not we who are talking, but words that are speaking of us, and one of the consequences of the loss of language is that public communication is idle between smooth and general rhetoric, more and more distant from the real situation of things.
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Internet public opinion's attitude towards youth can be roughly divided into several kinds, one is very flattering, which is not really to youth, but to use youth as a tool (consumers /labor, etc.), to achieve their own goals; the other attitude is preaching, the Internet is "daddy", refers to standing on the youth's problem context and emotional world, blame, trying to instill and reproduce the successful experience of their own generation; and the remaining attitude is more indifferent, subconsciously entering the "middle-aged and elderly mentality" prematurely. The perception that youth issues do not exist or are not important.
Compared with the above-mentioned daily life and the Internet, the two modes of discussion on youth issues, the counter-intuitive, anti-emotional, anti-hot,historical and ideological energy provided by the forums in these two days is extremely necessary and valuable. The life path and spiritual world of the young people of the 1920s and 1960s presented in these two days of discussion show meaning, and this serious manifestation itself is meaning. Correspondingly, as long as you look at the current "Mainland Youth Pain Literature/Film", you will know how poor and terrible the so-called mass culture industry understands and imagines young people.
When I brought the "youth issue" to reality and tried to conceive of today's statement, it found it very difficult. "When I start talking, I feel empty." Because as a member of youth, it becomes difficult to directly describe and examine your own situation. There seem to be a lot of words that can be said, but you will soon realize that these words are shaped by the media or other things, we use other people's words to describe our lives, wandering in the ocean of second-hand information, but we lack the minimum understanding and expression of ourselves at this moment.
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The first difficulty before me is that if we want to talk about youth as a real problem, who are the youth here? Or who is defining youth? Leaving aside the intergenerational distinction between the post-85s, post-90s, post-95s and post-00s, in a deeper dimension, the youth as a general description seems to have been disintegrated.
Screenshot of the promotional film "After the Wave"
On May Fourth Youth Day in 2020, Station B launched a promotional film "After the Wave", which caused an uproar. The main point of disagreement is, how do middle-aged vested interests define youth? Moreover, the youth shown in the film are urban youths with strong spending power, which cannot cover the majority of young people.
The meaning of "youth" is unprecedentedly general and vague: when everyone calls themselves "hit workers", the real migrant workers are still silent; when "small town writers" become the focus of attention, most small town youth are still invisible; when we denounce the control of people by the system, but also as part of the system, we give instructions to the delivery workers and couriers, reprimanding them for not being fast enough, forgetting that they are young people like us. Paradoxically, under the increasingly shared rhetoric, is the increasing segmentation of the population and unrelated lives.
Looking back at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the emergence of the concept of "youth" coincided with the great new life and the opening up of a new world, and was an important carrier of radical politics. In today's era of depoliticized, consumerist global capital, the "youth" with community colors have disappeared. Young people may not know what their mission and future are, and it is also difficult to perceive and understand other young people, unable to form a joint force, we are thus divided into their respective labor lines, become screws, or decomposed into their own small families, into the user portrait of the Internet platform, into the consumption data of the e-commerce platform and so on. The pressure on reality in each individual is great, so any blame for perfection or high-level arguments, if not connected to reality, is very pale.
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The inability to see other youth is not only a moral rebuke, but also a structural dilemma.
The growth of our generation itself is accompanied by a variety of competition mechanisms, and if you don't fight, you will most likely be out. Therefore, the ultimate power narrative and competition model of "The Biography of Zhen Huan" will become the film and television classic of our time. If you look at the massive barrage of "The Biography of Zhen Huan", you will be surprised by the familiarity and recognition of the many tenth-level "scholars" in this drama who are familiar with and identify with the routine of competition between people. In short, only growth does not develop, individuals to seek due returns, to win their own piece of the pie, will naturally bring resistance to each other's empathy and unity.
The issues listed above are very limited, but I feel that it is only after some preconditions have been cleaned up that I can try to talk about youth issues. I remember that teacher Ni Wenjian of East China Normal University once said when analyzing Zhao Shuli's novel: "We must use an unreliable self to speak to the same unfinished object", I think this sentence is also applicable to facing the problem of young people, including myself.
The quality of public discussion on the Internet is worrying. The deterioration of the Internet public opinion environment and the quality of information has led to the fact that the global village we once imagined was scattered with tribes that did not interact with each other, and the information highway we once envisioned was full of lies and garbage. What individuals see is only a fairly single "reality", and the current dialogue mechanism is quite unsatisfactory, and many times it is just a battle of positions, which leads to difficulties in opening up youth issues.
How to explore the situation of contemporary youth in a relatively rational way? In particular, I would like to emphasize two points:
The first is to attach importance to the dimension of history. When discussing youth topics, the indispensable frames of reference are May Fourth, the beginning of the founding of New China and the 1980s. It was a time when young people had high hopes and exalted subjectivity. The way we engage with historical experience is often inelastic and lacks the capacity for creative transformation. The intellectual community has not done a good job in this regard, and young people can only be very abstract in the use of historical experience, with strong emotional overtones.
Questions arise in all aspects of the world in which young people live, and they are full of challenges. For example, the relationship between people and groups, for the online generation, digital survival and virtual relationship are more real, reliable and sweet. For example, the relationship between individuals and groups, for the netizen generation, he does not need a group, because in a digital world, that virtual relationship brings them more reliable and sweet. In their own words, they can have no love, but their CP must be married.
In short, today is full of abuses and misuses of history, paradoxical appendages, emotional and moralized reproductions, and has also brought many meaningful position disputes. Emphasizing that realistic discussions should have a historical dimension is not a new view, and the difficulty is how to transform historical experience to enhance the ability to cope with reality under the premise that the context changes and historical experience becomes more and more bleak as "other places".
Stills of "Tamako Who Doesn't Seek Progress" Directed by Atsuhiro Yamashita and starring Atsuko Maeda.
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The second point I would like to emphasize is the question of agency. Compared with people's imagination of the state of youth as it should be, the current (or self-proclaimed) state of low desire, or the state of insufficient "burst of vitality" just said by the teacher, is particularly striking. I myself often get involved in this feeling of powerlessness and ask myself", "What to do". In order to get rid of nothingness and pessimism, to get rid of the air conditioner "going up", of course, you need a pair of cold eyes to see your position, which is inseparable from the overall analysis of the political and economic and social structure, but also rely on interdisciplinary cooperation and more holistic contemporary research.
In addition, I think it is also important to explore one's own inner and to have a constant dialogue between inside and outside, ideas and reality, thinking and action in daily life. From personal experience, school education and social life have set up many mechanisms and frameworks for young people to continuously reduce their inner richness and chase external indicators. And when life is filled, of course, there is no time and energy to get along with yourself. What is even more frightening is that the hollowed out self and the inflated self are often two sides of the same coin, and the more there is no inner richness, the larger the shell of that self, the easier it is to expand into the center of the self's line of sight.
Also, is it possible to achieve a cross-age dialogue? Many of the problems of young people stem from a lack of depth and experience, but many of them can be solved if there is effective dialogue across age groups rather than preaching. In a high-tech society, the elderly are always seen as outdated, and young people think that their problems are new, but they forget the possibility of resonating and inspiring each other on the basic issues of life. Recently, I read Teacher Zhao Yuan's essay on old age, I was very shocked, if we can empathize and understand others and different times of life, our own lives will be more full. If there is a sense of "career", if you can carefully pursue the distance in the length of life, it may open up young people to discuss different landscapes.
What's more, there is still room for little, limited action. Being able to find meaning or shining points in daily life, and some of the merits of the ordinary self, are great ways of self-cultivation, enough to heal and fill in the gradually hollowed out "self". And we do not lack a path to others and society around us, all that is needed is to take that step, I am willing to believe what teacher Qian Liqun said, with a tenacious spirit to immerse in the space, everything will quietly change.
Li Jing
【Attached】Li Jing, Doctor of Literature of Peking University, is currently an assistant researcher at the China Academy of Arts and a visiting researcher at the 9th China Museum of Modern Literature, with his main research interests in the history of contemporary Chinese literature, contemporary literature and cultural criticism. He has published more than 20 papers in academic journals such as Literary Review and Modern Chinese Literature Research Series, and is the author of "Renewing Yourself: Individual Discourse in Contemporary Cultural Phenomena".
The conference "'Youth' as a Historical and Ideological Topic" was hosted by the Commercial Press and the Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences of Peking University, and co-organized by the Beijing Contemporary Chinese History Reading Club.
Editor-in-Charge: Liang Jia
Proofreader: Shi Gong