Cultural Reverse I

The Past and Present of Intergenerational Revolution

Xiaohong Zhou

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429825408
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The phenomenon of "Cultural Reverse" (????) emerged in the 1980s after China's reform and opening up. In this era of rapid social change, the older generation started to learn from the younger generation across many fields, in a way that is markedly similar to the biological phenomenon of "The old crow that keeps barking, fed by their children" from ancient Chinese poetry. In this book, the author discusses this new academic concept and other aspects of Chinese intergenerational relations.

In the first volume, the author explains some popular social science theories about generations, traces the history of Chinese intergenerational relationships, and, through focus group interviews with 77 families in mainland China, comprehensively discusses the younger generation's values, attitudes, behavior patterns, and the ways in which they differ from their ancestors'.

The book will be a valuable resource for scholars of Chinese sociology, and also general readers interested in contemporary Chinese society.

1 Introduction

Cultural reverse and new patterns of intergenerational transmission

The process whereby the younger generation passes knowledge and culture to their living predecessors is what sociologists call “reversed socialization”. This involves a cultural flow analogous to the biological process of “crows returning nurturing to their parents”, which I define here—initially yet accurately—as “cultural reverse” or “cultural feedback”. This term, in its common sense, refers to the cultural transmission process from the younger generation to the older generation which prevails especially in a dramatically transitional society such as contemporary China.

Zhou Xiaohong

Cultural reverse or a reversed cultural pattern?

In 1988, ten years after China initiated its extensive reform and opening-up, I wrote down the above statement to address a social phenomenon emerging in China. Now, 42 years of reform and opening-up has transformed China from an age-old traditional society to a fairly modern one characterized by vigorous globalization and the socialist market economic system. The country has accomplished a succession of significant schemes proposed by Deng Xiaoping, the giant of the 20th century, with the gross domestic product (GDP) maintaining an average growth rate of around 10% over most of the past four decades, increasing from 364.5 billion CNY in 1978 to 99.1 trillion CNY in 2019. More importantly, the nation has undergone so extensive and profound a social reform that its political system, social structure, daily life, and zeitgeist—even people’s values and social behaviors—have all transformed accordingly, which is unprecedented in Chinese history; in fact, China’s transition during the past 42 years has surpassed in significance that of the preceding three centuries in total, both in terms of breadth and depth.

Among the many changes now taking place in China is one that is evolving inconspicuously but gradually gathering momentum, that is, the shifting status of educator and educatee. While this was firmly settled in traditional China, it has now for the first time become blurred, or even reversed, with the younger generation becoming the indisputable vanguard of political, economic, and cultural reforms. In the face of the younger generation’s new values, different behavior patterns, and somewhat nonconformist lifestyles, the older generation is perplexed and frowns, while at the same time more or less influenced and remolded by them. Some older people even go as far as involuntarily succumbing to their younger descendants. “This kind of ‘cultural reverse’ is an inevitable outcome of China’s involvement in the world integration through ten years of reform and opening-up preceded by ten years of seclusion. It is also a precursor of old China’s rejuvenation” (Zhou, 1988).

When I wrote down these words about 30 years ago, I was a recent graduate of sociology. It was also the time when our fathers, who seized political power under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, had reached their declining years and the reform and subsequent societal changes brought new ideas and opportunities for the young to influence them. Today, the even younger post-Cultural Revolution generation has grown up, and, due to globalization and China’s great progress over the past 42 years, they are able to influence both their parents and grandparents. As the two American sociologists, Berger and Luckmann, wrote in their later influential book The Social Construction of Reality, the reality was the construction of a society, and sociology was to study the implementation process of this construction (Berger & Luckmann, 1966). The younger generation which survived the “Cultural Revolution” was committed to constructing a better society. Forty years later, today’s young people—known as the “post-80s” and “post-90s”—are also striving to construct a society in compliance with their perceptions, experiences, and knowledge, though with more resources available than their predecessors. So, what makes this recent 42-year history of China unique is the fact that, while the continuation of conventional society or traditional culture depends on the younger generation’s recognition and assimilation of the long-established social reality, every older generation in modern China—our parents and our generation—has struggled to adapt to this changeful world through acceptance and assimilation of the social reality newly constructed by the younger generation, though with occasional confusion and pain and reluctance.

Take, for example, two events in our life. These two incidences or cases, at ten-year intervals, have obliged me to dwell on generational relationships and “cultural reverse” for over 30 years. They also epitomize how our generation influences our elders and is influenced by the next generation. As American sociologist Charles Wright Mills suggested in his 1959 work, sociologists must have “sociological imagination”—the intellectual qualities of using information to improve rationality and discern the world better; in other words, sociologists should have a capacity for perspectival transformation to be able to cover the most impersonal and indirect aspects of social change as well as the most personal aspects of the human self and see the connection between the two (Mills, 1959: 7). “The individual can understand his own experience and gauge his own fate only by locating himself within his period, that he can know his own chances in life only by becoming aware of those of all individuals in his circumstances” (Mills, 1959: 5). The two examples here, in Mills’s words, are indeed cases of individual anxiety or embarrassment, but someone with a sociological imagination can understand the social disturbance lurking behind them; in other words, the parent–child-relationship changes reflected in these two cases are actually a projection of social changes.

The 1988 case occurred in my own home. On October 1, 1984, just a month after the Tiananmen Square parade, Deng Xiaoping proposed disarmament by one million to modernize and rejuvenate China’s armed forces. So in 1985, my father, a veteran of 40 years in the army, left the military and was officially discharged. In order to comfort these veterans who dreamed of regaling their military ranks, when the government changed the uniforms in 1985 (which was a transitional form for the resumption of the military rank system in 1988), it also gave each retired soldier, including my father, a clothing fee ranging from 1,200 CNY to 2,000 CNY. After receiving the money, my father, with mixed feelings, took out 200 CNY (in the mid-1980s, this amount was equivalent to a professor’s monthly salary) for me, a poor graduate student in Nankai University then, to buy clothes. But at the same time, he expressly forbade me to buy a western suit, because he and a large number of older people his age saw western suits as synonymous with a bourgeois lifestyle. In fact, at that time, I already secretly put on more “western” jeans at school, but in order to respect the opinion of the “investor”, I bought a Mao suit. Unexpectedly, only three years later, that is, in the Spring Festival of 1988, early on the first day of the Chinese New Year, my father, an early riser, dragged me out of bed and pulled me to his bedroom. As he took a suit out of his closet, I felt a shyness on his face that I had never seen before. “Can you teach me how to wear a tie?” “Sure! Oh, Dad, you’re wearing a western suit, too!”

(Chang, 2003)

Coincidently, just one year before, I translated American anthropologist Margaret Mead’s Culture and Commitment, and was deeply fascinated by her generational culture theory. Given this background, I was naturally deeply touched by the events that occurred between my father and me. The idea that the “concessions” the older generation was making to the younger one in terms of values, attitudes, and patterns of behavior—for example, they performed a U-turn on disco dancing, once seen as a scourge—around 1988 made me realize that something akin to what Margaret Mead called “postfigurative culture” had emerged in China. In such circumstances, I wrote a long essay with more than 10,000 words entitled “On the significance of contemporary Chinese youth’s cultural reverse”. In this essay, I used a very localized concept, “cultural reverse”, to refer to the phenomenon of the transfer of knowledge and culture from the younger generation to their living predecessors.¹ I defined “cultural reverse” as “the process of extensive cultural absorption from the younger generation to the older generation in the era of rapid cultural change” (Zhou, 1988).

The decade that followed, especially the years after 1992, was a period of even more rapid social change in China. However, due to the widespread “political turmoil” in the spring of 1989 and the gloomy social atmosphere in the following years, as well as the change of my own academic interests, I did not return to this subject for ten years. Then, in the spring of 1998, a trivial incident happening around me awoke my interest in this topic.

In mainland China, computers began to enter ordinary people’s homes in the early 1990s, and the first machine I bought was a clunky Intel 80286 desktop computer. Then, in 1994, China joined the Internet as the 71st national network. By then, the Internet had connected more than 40,000 networks and 3.8 million computer mainframes worldwide. In the years that followed, more and more people in Chinese society began to enter the cyberspace known as the information superhighway: In the winter of 1995, Ms. Bu Wei, now a famous communication expert in the field of Internet research, came to Beijing Baishiqiao Yinghaiwei Science and Education Center, and listened to the first lecture on the Internet with a full house of children (Yan & Bu, 1997: 210). In March 1997, when I was writing my doctoral dissertation Tradition and Change—Social Psychology of Farmers in Jiangsu and Zhejiang and Its Evolution Since Modern Times, I also registered my first email address on the Internet, and sent the first email to professor Elizabeth Perry, director of the Fairbank Center for East Asian Studies at Harvard University, which I visited in 1999.

During those years, people could be heard talking and discussing computers and the Internet all over the campus. What is most exciting for the children of professors who grew up on campus is that many departments are now handing out computers to their teachers, making it possible for children to choose what Nicholas Negroponte calls “digital living” first (Negroponte, 1995). In March 1998, on the day just after the Spring Festival, the Graduate School of Nanjing University gathered all the graduate tutors in the Zhixing Building adjacent to the Graduate School to grade the postgraduate entrance examination papers of that year. This gave professors a chance to gossip as they did not see each other very often. Sociology professors were still discussing World War II topics raised by professor P, an “expert on military history”, whereas nearby Chinese professors discussed the most fashionable topic of the day: computers and the Internet. Interestingly, in their discussion concerning how to use computers and the net, my good friend Prof. Z, in the face of confident and unyielding colleagues, unexpectedly used what in his opinion was the most convincing refutation, “No, no. My son said …”

Almost as soon as his words were uttered, my inspiration or “sociological imagination”, which had been dormant for a decade, was revived; in other words, I suddenly realized the “revolutionary” meaning of this sentence. Contrast that with the classic “My dad says …” or “Our teacher says …”, and it is no exaggeration to say that this university professor’s method of argument not only proved the emergence of new ways of cultural inheritance, but also heralded the arrival of a completely new society. To put it matter-of-factly, anyone who had observed society carefully and with some sensitivity could find that in the age of the Internet society and digital survival, parents were willing to “worship” their children as teachers in front of computers. It was but one example in a long line of events that had upended the traditional relationship between the generations of parents and children in our rapidly changing world. That same year, Guo Yuhua, an anthropologist in Beijing, felt that “children get more food information and knowledge from the market, advertisements, and their peers than their elders” (Guo, 1998), so parents often learned about food from their children. These examples and opinions inspired me to wonder whether we could prove the revolutionary changes in the cultural inheritance pattern within the family and even in the whole society through the description and analysis of such a series of similar events, and thus to review the completely different social and cultural changes between the current society and the previous one.

Sensitive people may have noticed that I have used the words “reversed” and “revolutionary” many times here to describe the changes in intergenerational relations that have occurred in an era of rapid social change in China. It is true that in our age of such change, the end of many old things and the emergence of new things are more revolutionary than in previous times. Of course, the “revolution” here no longer has the violent overtones of the French Revolution or Mao Zedong’s era, and is no longer “the violent action of one class to overthrow another class” (Mao, 1967: 17). Many people before me have used the term “silent revolution” to describe the invisible changes in values and social behavior that occur during changing times (Reich, 1970; Inglehart, 1977).² In 1998, less than a year after Dryden and Voss’s Revolution of Learning hit the market, books on the subject of “revolution” abounded: Revolution of Parents, Revolution of Students, Management Revolution, Education Revolution. It gave us a taste of the power of fashion, or trend, in a country where enthusiasm for “political revolution” had waned.

I call the changes in the intergenerational relations of Chinese society over the past 40 years “revolutionary” because it unrelentingly overturns the father-guides-son parent–child relationship formed in traditional China over thousands of years as well as the whole relationship between the “educator” and the “educatee” in our society. As we all know, since the dawn of civilization, no matter what changes have taken place in society, or how different the contents of cultural inheritance and socialization are, the transmission direction and roles of the educator and the educatee are always fixed: In terms of the direction of cultural inheritance, it is always passed from one generation to the next. Accordingly, within the family, the parents always play the role of the educator, and the children always play the role of the educatee. The sequential nature of the two generations in the biological reproduction chain determines the inequality of the two sides in social education. In the social education process, “father guiding son” is regarded as the basic rule of cultural inheritance in all civilized societies.

However, the above rule and its inherent rationality were challenged in all aspects after the reform and opening-up in 1978. Everywhere we see the phenomenon of the older generation being inferior to the younger generation as in the above two cases, and we find that this phenomenon of parental under-achievement not only affects most families (whether you are an ordinary citizen or a well-educated college professor, you are likely to be challenged by children), but also exists in almost all areas of social life, from values, life attitudes, and behavior patterns to the use of devices such as TV, mobile phones, and computers, so much so that we have to admit that, today, all of these changes between parents and children are truly revolutionary.

From a sociological point of view, this unique phenomenon means that traditional ways of socialization are changing. In other words, socialization is no longer a one-way discipline process, but a two-way or even multi-directional communication and guidance process. If we say that the socialization of traditional society is mainly the education of minor individuals in society by adults and families, schools, and other social organizations presided over by adults, making them accept the values and behavior patterns advocated by the mainstream culture of society and develop the personality compatible with society, then, in the era of a great transformation of society and culture, those adults who have already completed the socialization process in the traditional way, in order to act in ways that contribute to the proper functioning of this changing society, must constantly experience the process of resocialization that produces entirely new values and social behaviors that are inconsistent or even different from those of the past. It is from this point on that the young generation, which embodies the new values and behavior patterns, is likely to become the educator instead of the traditional educatee, and to become the subject of socialization instead of the object.

In the following section, I will explain that the above-mentioned “reversed socialization” or “Postfigurative Culture” as Mead calls it is a very common phenomenon in the modernizing changes that have taken place around the world following World War II, especially during the process of globalization. However, it is worth noting that the particularity of Chinese society lies in the following: First, it is a country whose tradition is deeply rooted and which has not been properly baptized as a modern civilization because of repeated internal and external troubles. After 30 years of isolation, stagnation, and even regression after 1949, the country suddenly faced reform and opening-up in 1978 to a very modern outside world. Such a sharp contrast made the process of the change of the older generation from “supremacy” to “backwardness” happen almost instantly. It also made the “subversion” of the traditional parent–child relationship in China more sudden than in any other country. Second, because of the Cultural Revolution, which began in 1966, only a handful of the post-1949 generation benefited from Deng Xiaoping’s reforms and receive an elite college education at the end of their youth, and become the mainstay of society in middle age.

Most of them have long since lost their youth and achieved nothing after revolting, joining the army, going to the countryside, returning to the cities, and being laid off. However, their children, born after the “Cultural Revolution” or the reform and opening-up, have benefited from the economic and social development of China and enjoy a good education and an environment of growth; they have almost become a know-it-all, omnipotent generation. Just look at this data: In 1977, China’s universities enrolled 270,000 students, with a gross enrollment rate of 4.70%; 42 years later, in 2019, the same universities enrolled 8.20 million students with a gross enrollment rate of 79.53%. In just 42 years, Chinese university enrollment has increased 17-fold, which means many Chinese families now face the embarrassment of having sons or daughters who know a lot and parents who don’t. Although the differences between the lives of Americans born during the Great Depression and their post-war children are almost as great as those of the Cultural Revolution generation and their children—parents growing up in an era of material scarcity, while their children live in an era of material abundance (Elder, 2002: 7)—clearly there is no great spiritual gap, from “closed” to “open”, between the two generations in America. The contrast between the material and spiritual lives of the two or three living generations is so great that the traditional parent–child relationship has been overturned more thoroughly in China than in any other country. Therefore, in the past 30 years, I have always believed that although “cultural reverse” or reversed socialization may not be a unique phenomenon in Chinese society, the post-1978 China must be the country where the “generational revolution” is most vividly expressed.

Intergeneration relationships: from a globalized perspective

Obviously the topic we are discussing here is “generation” and the intergenerational relationship resulting from the coexistence of different generations. “Generation” is a biological fact, and it is because of intergenerational succession that humans as biological beings can survive to this day; at the same time, however, “generation” is also a social fact, because from the day of birth, every individual is bound to be subject to “generation”, an external and mandatory universal force—since he has his own parents, he will inevitably form...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1. Introduction: cultural reverse and new patterns of intergenerational transmission
• 2. Intergenerational relations and their transitions: a historical review
• 3. Revolution in the depths of the soul
• 4. The break of behavioral modes
• 5. Artifact power not to be neglected
• References
• Index