Reimagining China

Reimagining China Synopsis

Reimagining China explores the lives and cultural imaginations of China's millennials and Generation Z, those born from the mid-1980s to the turn of the millennium amid unprecedented social transformations in both China and the world. Confronted with intensifying geopolitical rivalry, economic uncertainty, the COVID-19 pandemic, and shifting cultural values, Chinese youth navigate through competing visions of identity, belonging, and national destiny. Through their aspirations, disillusionment, resistance, and resilience, this book reveals how young Chinese are reimagining both themselves and a rapidly changing nation.

Grounded in European youth studies and informed by the British Cultural Studies tradition, author Wendy Su identifies and investigates five key themes that define contemporary Chinese youth cultures and subcultures in a post-pandemic era: youth popular nationalism, youth idealism, lying flat-ism and nonviolent resistance, fan culture, and global imagination through the reception of Western and Eastern screen culture. These thematic focal points capture the diverse and often contradictory responses of Chinese youth to the rapidly shifting sociopolitical landscape. Additionally, Su critically examines the evolving relationship between the state and youth, paying particular attention to how young people navigate and negotiate the dual forces shaping their cultural expressions and identities, namely, state authority and market capitalism.

By focusing on the cultural practices, experiences, and expressions of young Chinese people, Reimagining China explores the search for collective identity amid conflicting discourses of national and global development and suggests the contours of a viable, pluralistic modernity rooted in shared Asian values and post-Western global imaginaries.