Sun Jiashan Zhao Yi
Since the reform and opening up, the degree of opening up to the outside world has been deepened, providing the soil for the growth of youth culture with global characteristics. Since the 1990s, the circulation of commodities under the socialist market economy has become more and more mature, the influence of the mass media has begun to intervene in daily life on a large scale, the cultural industry has begun to develop explosively since the turn of the century, and youth culture has become more and more diversified.
Since the 1980s, the cultural structure has moved from "great unification" to a gradually diversified pattern, and youth culture as a rebellious feature of a subsidiary cultural form has begun to emerge. It can be said that the current flow of youth culture is itself a product of reform and opening up.
The process of this reform and opening up giving birth to youth culture in the 1980s and 1990s was mainly reflected in two aspects: First, it promoted the liberation of young people from the repressed state, and the individualization of young people's thoughts was respected and carried forward. For example, the liberating expression of young people's love in the early 1980s film "Lushan Love" was of great significance to the emotional enlightenment of young people at that time. Movies such as "Red Dress on the Street" also reflect the trend of the times when young people pursued fashion and opposed single ideas. Without the emancipation of the mind that ran through the 1980s, there would be no such new phenomena, which are the liberation of man, the liberation of beauty, and the liberation of emotional thought.
Second, youth culture shows more and more consumer characteristics, which is directly related to the vitality of the market economy since the reform and opening up. Capital elements are fully integrated into youth life, and the images of urbanization and modernization are increasing in youth culture.
After entering the new century, the vigorous development of the market economy and the accelerated globalization of the economy and culture have brought a completely new picture. Reform and opening up has allowed China to embrace the global market as never before, and youth culture has become more and more international. In particular, the rapid maturity and popularization of the Internet has made a new generation of youth culture show an unprecedented proactive posture, and the boundaries between virtual space and the real world have begun to blur.
For example, in 2002, the Hangzhou Yuhang Xiaobaihuayue Opera Troupe, the Zhejiang Dramatists Association and the Shanghai Yue Theatre signed a cooperation agreement to adapt the best-selling online novel "The First Intimate Contact" into a Yue opera version, starring Zhao Zhigang, the "Prince of Yue Opera". This cross-border cooperation has been placed on the high hope of "letting feverish novels drive the development of Yue opera", from online best-selling novels to the reform and innovation of traditional opera, in fact, it has also announced the formation of a new cultural structure.
The development of the Internet has also spawned the formation of youth online subcultures. On the one hand, more and more youth subculture phenomena have begun to pour into the mainstream vision, including shouting, hip hop, street dance and other subcultures that have been in the "underground" or "semi-underground" state in the past, which are popular with young people but are obviously marginalized, and have received sustained attention from the mainstream media. On the other hand, these subcultures have also been criticized for the drug involvement of individual artists and touching the basic limits of society, and have been criticized as hip-hop culture, decadence and "mourning" culture.
At the same time, the mainstreaming and commercialization of youth culture has taken on a more complex picture of the times. The young generation who have been accused of being the consumers of hip-hop culture, decadence and "mourning" culture are also consumers of traditional culture and mainstream culture. From "I Repair Cultural Relics in the Forbidden City", "Chinese Poetry Conference", "Readers", "National Treasures" to "Wolf Warrior 2" and "Red Sea Action", traditional culture and main theme themes continue to create ratings and click rate records in many fields such as film and television, the Internet, etc., which is probably unimaginable "news" a few years ago.
Undoubtedly, the changes in the phenomenon of youth culture maintain an "isomorphic" relationship with the historical process of reform and opening up. Culture, as the embodiment of spiritual values, directly reflects major changes in the political and economic fields.