The World of Chinese, 2011 Issue 5: Youth

Co-producer: Beijing Center for the Promotion of Chinese Overseas 协办：北京汉语国际推广中心

Issue 5/2011

目录 CONTENTS

COVER STORY

ANYONE CAN INNOVATE

26 KUANG KUANG GROWS UP

50 ART’S NEW PATRON 淘宝，创意青年的新出路

哐哐与八零后

An internet cartoon captures the discontent of a generation

COVER STORY

34 REVOLUTION YOUTH

How Taobao is changing the lives of China’s young, creative and broke

SOCIAL CHINESE

WILDCARD

54 THE ELEMENTS OF SLANG

64 THE BIRD MEN

辛亥革命时代的年轻人

俚语入门

玩鸟的老北京

The young fighters and idealists who shaped history

Get hip to the jive with this slang tutorial

This old-timer hobby will blow you out of skies

COVER STORY

30 YEARS

CITY STROLL

42 “I DIDN’T MAKE IT FOR YOU” 小众艺术，想说爱你不容易 Three artists share the trials and rewards of China’s youth subcultures

COVER Issue 5/2011

STORY

BUSINESS

58 LEARNING ENGLISH 中国人三十年的学英语之路 Studying English was once considered treason—now things have changed

TRAVEL

68 TWO DAYS IN WUHAN 武汉两日 Uncovering new life in the cradle of the Xinhai Revolution

CULTURE

LANGUAGE

REGULARS 3 EDITOR’S LETTER 卷首语

9 NEWS 新闻

10 THE HARD SEAT 多棱镜

12 DON’T MISS 不可错过

QUESTIONING

CURIOUS CHRONICLES

扫地的唐老八

《三言二拍》之善有善报

14 DIARY OF A STREET SWEEPER FUMBLING FOREIGNER

A parable about jail, jealous husbands and reaping what you sow

一小瓶口服液带来的大扫荡

PIONEER

16 MEDICINE MADNESS 17 ASK AYI

有话问阿姨 LEGENDS OF CHINA

19 THE WISE MAN ON THE OX 骑牛的智者——老子 KALEIDOSCOPE

20 GENERATION GAP 隔代如隔山

Old and young pose their differences

An interview with Disney English’s Andrew Sugerman ON THE CHARACTER

86 街

说“街” Find out what’s happening down in the streets and alleyways AUDIO-VISUAL WORLD

88 “THE GREAT REVIVAL”

秋季如何润肺

92 THE GEEK CORNER

DID YOU KNOW

The star-studded blockbuster that’s resurrecting China’s past

高手学堂

7 6 KOWLOON’S KING WAS AN ARTIST AND A VANDAL?

ADVENTURES IN CHINESE

The garbageman who became the first graffiti artist

我不可以说“谢谢”？

涂鸦第一人是“九龙皇帝”？ CFP

对话迪士尼高级副总裁，迪士尼英语总经理 Andrew Sugerman

《建党伟业》

Relieve your cough with this home-brewed remedy

by

84 A WHOLE NEW WORLD OF LEARNING

OLD WIVES’ TALES

75 PEAR SOUP

Photographs

82 KARMA AND THE CRASHING WALL

CHI LE MA

78 GOT A HAKKA-ING FOR TOFU? 客家酿豆腐

This hearty Hakka dish is perfect for a cold autumn day Issue 5/2011

94 I CAN’T JUST SAY THANKS? Save embarrassment, learn how culture is crucial to language learning STRANGE BUT TRUE

96 趣闻

封面 故事 COVER STORY

KUANG KUANG GROWS UP

Photograph

by

Getty

为 鼻 表 为 人

什么一个流 血的小男孩 了 八 零 后 什么这些年 开 始 怀 旧

着 代 ？ 轻 ？

H o w a bl o o dy n o se d c art o o n bo y e m bo di e s C hi n a’s po st - 8 0 ’s g e n e rat i o n

B Y G I N G E R H U A N G ( 黄原竟)

ll of you who haven’t handed in your homework stand at the back of the room!” A bosomy, large woman bellows at the class. A line of kids shivers against the black board. She looms closer to them clutching a bamboo ruler.

This is a scene from “Kuangkuang’s Diaries” (《哐哐 日记》 Ku`ngku`ng R#j#),” an independent online cartoon whose most popular episodes have been viewed 5 million times. The animation is set in the 1980s and revisits the era through the story of Kuangkuang, a boy in the fourth grade. A drop of blood dangles perpetually from his nostril and he drags a “serve the people” school bag on the ground behind him wherever he goes. He has bad luck in school. The teachers beat him. When bullies accost him he is weak but unwilling to give in.

Most of Kuangkuang’s fans are the so-called post-80s

I ♥ 80s

80S NOSTALGIA IS MAKING A RAGING COMEBACK IN CHINA START COLLECTING Check out Nengmao Shop's 80s merchandise (能猫商店), Wudaoying Hutong, Beijing

generation (八零后 b`l!ngh7u). The cartoon’s depictions of childhood in the 1980s are so accurate that every episode inspires a new discussion in which viewers excitedly share their childhood memories. “My Chinese teacher was also the teacher I feared most!” “Oh, I had nearly forgotten about the disgusting squatting toilets…” “My classroom also had Confucius and Marx on the wall.” “Seeing these things it makes me want to laugh and want to cry.”

Through Kuangkuang, the post-80s generation nationwide has discovered that, no matter where they grew up, their childhoods were remarkably the same. They all had strict teachers, class meetings, limited varieties of snacks and games, endless homework. Though it doesn’t sound like a very exciting time, these days that generation is obsessed with it more than ever. Kuangkuang fans have even formed an online community called “Kuang People” (哐人类 Ku`ng R9nl-i). To cater to this flood of 80s nostalgia, replicas of items from that period have begun to replace the ubiquitous Red Nostalgia Lei Feng and Che products with thermoses, toys, metal basins and sneakers.

“Kuangkuang is always bullied, but he always holds his head up high,” says Pi San, the script writer and director of “Kuangkuang’s Diaries,” “That’s why he appeals so much to the post-80s. They are not a bunch of lucky people.”

In “Kuangkuang’s Diaries,” no child has siblings.

1980 was the first year of China’s One Child Policy. As a result, most of the urban post-80s are only children.

For a long time they were called “little emperors” (小 皇帝 xi2o hu1ngd#), as they became the center of their

HUILI SNEAKERS 回力鞋 Hu!l#xi9 The shoes worn for morning exercise, phys-ed and basketball.

“THE INSPIRATION WAS THAT I MYSELF HAD BEEN ROBBED IN THE SCHOOL TOILET” will sweat for decades to pay their apartments off. This is the generation that prompted the addition of words like “house slaves” (房奴 f1ngn%) and “car slaves” (车奴 ch8n%) to the 2011 Xinhua Dictionary. There is nothing “imperial” about these once “little emperors.” A popular post online recently made fun of the post-80s situation: “When we paid to go to primary school, it was free to go to university; when we paid for university, it was free to go to primary schools. Before we had jobs, jobs were statedistributed; when we found jobs, we needed to fight each other not to starve. Before we entered the stock market, even fools were making tons of money; when we entered it, we found we were the fools. Before we got married, people married on bicycles; now that we want to marry, we need a house and a car. Before we started to make money, apartments were free; when we started making money, we found that we couldn’t afford an apartment.”

This sense of deprivation has caused widespread embitterment among the post-80s generation, which

HOT WATER THERMOS 暖水瓶

PANASONIC STEREO 录音机

l&y~nj~

Only people with money and the right connections could buy a Panasonic stereo.

Issue 5/2011

nu2nshu@p!ng

Collecting hot water was a daily activity. Often pairs of thermoses were given away as wedding presents.

封 面 故 事

29 COVER STORY

families’ attention. Their parents, who had gone through the Great Famine and the Cultural Revolution, tried their best to provide their only children with the best food and education they could afford. They were considered the indulged and spoiled generation. But now, the title “emperor” is barely mentioned.

“When I watch Kuangkuang, I miss the simplicity of my childhood so much,” Hu Xin, a book editor, told me. Now 28, she married a year ago and is saving with her husband for a 20-year mortgage, soaring commodity prices and future childrearing expenses. Her well-paid husband works seven days a week, from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m., in the country’s largest software company. The young couple never had the time to take their honeymoon. “Sometimes I feel like I don’t know myself anymore,” she says. “I just know I’m tired.”

Twenty years ago she was poor, but so was everyone.

People had no money, but there was not much to buy.

“A family with 10,000 RMB (万元户 w3nyu1nh&)” was a nickname for the rich, and a five RMB note was a fortune for a kid. With it, Hu says she could buy a strawberryflavored eraser, an iron pencil box, a comic book, a handful of Big-Big bubble gums and a luxurious page of Saint Seiya stickers.

Now Hu Xin is buying a sunny flat and designer bags, but she doesn’t feel the same bliss as when she used to buy bubble gum as a child. A recent survey showed that the average age of mortgagees in Beijing is only 27.

This means that the major consumers of the capital’s housing market are young people in their twenties, who

makes them love the black humor and occasional South Park-style violence in “Kuangkuang’s Diaries.” In the episode “A One Mao Note” ( 《一毛钱》 Y# M1o Qi1n), Kuangkuang is robbed of one mao by his teacher’s son.

He wants to get it back by seeking justice from teachers, but the teachers are indifferent. He decides to unite all the students who have been robbed and confront the

bully, but all the other kids back off at the last second.

Finally, he scares the bully by striking his own head with a brick and gets his one mao back. When Pi San wrote the script, he wanted to represent how a child can deal with, or even defy, violence without returning it. “The inspiration was that I myself had been robbed of money in the school toilet,” he says. But as the episode spread on internet and was watched 600,000 times, viewers began associating it with current issues such as migrant workers who cannot get their salaries and China’s recent Red Cross scandal. The episode took on other meanings driven by the viewers’ inner frustrations.

“When the post-80s finally had a right to speak, they found that there were barely any social resources left for them,” Pi San says. “They are unlucky. They shouldered most of the pressure resulting from the drastic economic changes happening in China.”

STUDY MACHINE 小霸王

Xi2o B3w1ng

This video game console was called a “study machine” (学习机).

Students studied hard to be rewarded with it.

W

about the cartoon, post-90s decried the teacher beatings portrayed in the cartoon as false. “I never experienced these kinds of beatings!” the post-90s said.

However the biggest difference between the two generations, or at least the one that’s talked about the most, is their experience with sex. The post-80s grew up in a decade when sex was still strictly taboo. In “38th Parallel,” Kuangkuang, as always, is called “a little scoundrel” by his head teacher, this time because he was playing with the girl sitting next to him. The education children received then was that boys could only play with boys, and girls could only play with girls. If a kid played with the opposite sex it was considered indecent, and the only way a boy could show a girl that he liked her was to bully her. The ways to get a little sex education were numbered: pulp literature, health magazines like “Family Doctor” and “The Origin of Humans,” and porn videotapes hidden by parents at home. Those who had never seen a porn video were looked down upon.

面 故 事

HIS CRIME WAS GIGGLING AND BLURTING OUT, “THE PRINCIPAL FARTED!”

SEAGULL WATCH 海鸥表

H2i'4ubi2o

People would show off their Seagull watch by raising their wrists in an exaggerated fashion.

PLUM BLOSSOM SPORTSWEAR 运动服

y&nd7ngf%

The brand “plum blossom (梅花)” became popular after the Chinese team wore it for the 1984 Olympics.

Issue 5/2011

封

31 COVER STORY

hile the post-80s make up the main demography of tax payers and house bu ye r s, t h e post-90s generation have also gained social attention with their loud voices, egocentric behaviors and new culture. The post-80s have always want to draw a clear line between themselves and the post-90s. “No post-90s are allowed to watch (九零后拒 绝观看 ji^l!ngh7u j&ju9 gu`nk3n),” announces “The Diary of Kuangkuang” at the beginning of each episode.

Just as the post-80s were disparaged as “the decaying generation” when they were teenagers, society has continued to write off the post-90s as brain-damaged, filled with vulgar tastes, soullessly materialistic and too sexually open. Many post-80s seem happy to echo the prejudice. However, it is common to see comments under Kuangkuang episodes like, “I’m a post-90s. I like it. Why aren’t we allowed to watch?”

Post-80s’ main objection, in addition to run-of-the-mill prejudice against the heathenish, rising generation, is that the post-90s have had it better than them, and as a result can’t understand what it was like growing up in the 80s. Post-80s were enraged when, on discussion boards

The post-90s, by contrast, have grown up in a much more open media environment. “My best friend in my class is a weiniang,” a 14-year-old girl once told me, baffling me with the anime-inspired jargon that means hermaphrodite. She went on to recite an encyclopedia of terms for different sexual inclinations, which, to my post-80s ears, sounded as distant and complicated as Swahili.

However, the two generations share many things, whether they want to admit it or not. The post-80s were trained under the notion of collectivism. This mindset is ridiculed in an episode of Kuangkuang entitled “Bombing the School” (《炸学校》Zh3 Xu9xi3o), in which Kuangkuang is beaten up (in this episode, to death) by teachers after

deviating from the collective. His crime? Giggling and blurting out, “The principal farted!” after the principal breaks wind during a speech. He is alone in his laughter; the other students, of course, pretend to have heard nothing.

In Kuangkuang’s time everything was done in unison: in the morning the children read out loud from their textbooks together, then conducted synchronized morning exercises; this was followed two classes later by synchronized eye exercises. In festivals children always did chorus or group dances. They were not encouraged to be individuals. The same activities are practiced in the school system today, which is why, although the post-90s may not completely understand Kuangkuang, they can still appreciate its sarcasm.

P

i San was able to transcend the gap between generations.

He was born in the 1970s himself. “I like the post-80s,” he says.

“Compared with us post-70s, the post-80s have more individual values.”

In the episode “My Ideal” (《我的理 想》 W6 de L@xi2ng), we are given a look at banhui, the weekly class meeting. “Banhui is the place where children were taught how to lie,” 27-year-old Chen Ruoshui grimaces as Kuangkuang brings banhui memories back to her. In this episode, every kid is required to say what they aspire to be in the future, and they all repeat things like P.L.A. soldier, scientist and teacher (to please the teacher). Only Kuangkuang says, “I don’t have an ideal.” As usual, he gets punished.

“He is stubborn. He may be naïve, but he holds on to what he thinks is right,” Pi San says. “And that’s where the post-80s usually surpass us. For example, Han Han (韩寒) is a representative voice of the post-80s generation. There is no comparable representative of the post-70s generation.”

网

LINKS to Kuangkuang videos www.theworldofchinese.com

THEY GREW UP INTO AN AGE WHERE A WHITE COLLAR WORKER NEEDS TO WORK 50 YEARS TO AFFORD AN APARTMENT

- Additional research by Chen Qiufan (陈楸帆)

面 故 事

33

CHINESE YOU NEED

to represent

d3ibi2o

代表

Kuangkuang represents the 80s generation.

Ku`ngku`ng d3ibi2ole b`l!ngh7u.

哐哐代表了八零后。 bully

q~fu

欺负 to fart

nostalgia

f3ngp#

Hey everyone, the principal just farted!

T5ngxu9men, xi3ozh2ng g`ngc1i f3ngp# le!

放屁

同学们，校长刚才放屁了！

hu1iji&

怀旧

Issue 5/2011

封

COVER STORY

The young writer Han Han is generally recognized as of the spokesman of the post-80s crowd (although the first thing Wikipedia and Baidu mention about him is that he’s “a Chinese professional rally driver”). Han Han wrote the best-selling novel of the past 20 years, and founded a popular but short-lived literature magazine. His most influential platform, however, continues to be his blog, which deals boldly with controversial topics, especially social issues. “Han Han and his peers do not have our generation’s fear,” Zhang Ming (张鸣), a famous historian born in the 1950s, said to his young audience. “My peers have a lot of fears, although they don’t even know what they are afraid of. I don’t see that fear in young people like Han Han. Your generation should live on like that. You may not be able to replicate Han Han, but you can also be fearless and speak out.”

Pi San shows the same discontent with his own 70s-born generation. “Our generation has been brainwashed by ideological education. We are idealists—but it’s a kind of idealism that makes us always want to represent others, a symptom common of the post-60s and post-70s. The post-80s are way more independent. It doesn’t matter what you do—a shoe cobbler or a programmer, or whatever—it matters that you can think independently. This is what I call a real civic spirit, and I see that in the post-80s generation.”

Pi San always says that “the post-80s don’t have luck,” but the luck they do have is relative. It’s true that their childhoods were as opressive as Kuangkuang’s and they grew up into an age where a white collar worker needs to work 50 years to afford an apartment in Beijing; but compared with their fathers and mothers, they have more freedom to find their place in the world and think on their own. These days, some of them, at least, are using that freedom.

封面 故事 COVER STORY

REVOLUTION

YOUTH 一 百 年 前 ， 这 些 年 轻人经历了一场改变 中 国 命 运 的 革 命 。

A hu n dre d ye ars a g o t he y sha pe d a m o v e m e n t t hat t ran sfo r m e d C hi n a

BY SHEPHERD LAUGHLIN

“T

he young are forever revolutionary,” 20th century scholar Wen Yiduo once wrote.

“Revolutionaries are forever young.”

After all, what is revolution but a great turning from the old to the new—or in human terms, the young? Young people not only have the audacity, imagination and fearlessness to foment revolution, they have the least to lose and the most to gain. And they have the tinderbox-like ability to set the world on fire with the help of a single spark.

In 1911, that spark was an accidental explosion set off by a group of young revolutionaries building bombs in the city of Wuchang. The detonation drew the attention of authorities, leading the caged-in revolutionaries to stage an early coup. It was this that led to the Wuchang Uprising—the event that touched off the Xinhai Revolution, and brought down millennia of imperial rule. With one bomb, the group set off shock waves that toppled a dynasty and continue to be felt today.

For the generation born in the 1880s and 90s, nothing would ever be the same. In honor of them and the 100th anniversary of the revolution we share five of their stories.

Issue 5/2011

THE TRAGIC IDEALIST SONG JIAOREN

封 面 故 事

COVER STORY

36

Song Jiaoren ( 宋教仁 ) was preparing to board a train at the Shanghai Railway Station late at night on March 20, 1913, when shots rang out. He called out to friends, who came running, but it was too late: Song had been assassinated at the age of 30.

It was a violent end to a youth spent in political tumult. Born in 1882, Song Jiaoren was one of the youngest major leaders of the Xinhai Revolution and the first president of the Kuomintang. He spent his early years in his native Hunan studying the Confucian classics, but after moving to thriving Wuchang (in present-day Wuhan), he began to study Western science and ideas, and joined the young intellectuals in the city clamoring for revolution.

Song fled to Japan in 1905 and remained a fugitive there until 1910, refining his ideas about how best to overthrow the Qing Dynasty and run the country afterwards. Returning to China as a full-fledged rebel, he edited a revolutionary paper in Shanghai. Sick in bed at the time of the Wuchang Uprising, Song was cured instantly on hearing of the events and their successes.

After the Republic of China was established, Song was appointed to reform China’s legal system, and soon began to organize the Kuomintang in preparation for the nation’s first parliamentary elections. In December 1912, the Kuomintang won huge majorities, and many suspected that Song would become the premier of the new government. It was the closest thing to a democratic election ever conducted on the Chinese mainland.

Trying to work out a new arrangement for sharing power, Song planned a visit to Peking to discuss matters with China’s provisional president, Yuan Shikai, a notoriously shady figure whose alliances shifted with the political winds.

Song never made it; he was killed en route. Many have assumed that Yuan was behind the killing, but since all of the assassination conspirators were either killed or disappeared, the mystery remains unsolved to this day.

SICK IN BED, SONG WAS CURED INSTANTLY ON HEARING OF THE UPRISING’S SUCCESS

PRINCE ZAI FENG WITH HIS TWO SONS

PRINCE ZAI FENG (CENTER) TRAVELING THROUGH HONG KONG IN 1901

THE BLUEBLOOD

封

PRINCE ZAIFENG

面

Issue 5/2011

by

Photograph

Wang waved revolutionary newspaper articles in the air and declared that they were written in ink, but “I wanted to translate them into blood.” Zaifeng spared his life.

Though indecisive, Zaifeng did make some progress during his brief three-year regency. He convened the first meeting of the National Assembly in 1910, and some think that if the revolution had not occurred, China might have become a constitutional monarchy under his leadership.

But at the first meeting, the assemblymen failed to kneel in his presence, and according to a biographer, “thereafter life was never again the same for Zaifeng.”

Zaifeng, like everyone else, was caught by surprise by the success of the Wuchang Uprising. Imperial forces put up a fight, but could not contain the spread of revolution, and the Qing Dynasty soon abdicated. Less than a year later, Zaifeng announced that he formally accepted the Republic of China. For this he was spared a life of humiliation, and was well treated even by the Communists in his final years, even as his hapless son remained a revolutionary punching bag.

THE GROUP DECIDED TO PLANT A BOMB BENEATH A BRIDGE THAT ZAIFENG CROSSED EVERY DAY

事

37 COVER STORY

CFP

故

For a man whose family believed that heaven had installed them as supreme rulers at the center of the universe, Prince Zaifeng (载沣) was a worldly fellow. He was one of the first members of the Chinese imperial family ever to leave the Middle Kingdom—his early “apology tour” of Germany was a chance for the royals to express regret for the murder of the German ambassador during the Boxer Rebellion.

Although no one’s idea of a “youth” at the time of the Xinhai Revolution, Zaifeng was only 28 when, on his watch, the curtain came crashing down on 2,000 years of dynastic rule. Empress Dowager Cixi had planned to use him as her next docile puppet, appointing his son Puyi as the imperial successor. But her death just one day later on November 15, 1908 left Zaifeng suddenly in charge of a sinking ship.

Foreigners liked the well-traveled Zaifeng. When Beijing banker E. G. Hillier learned that Zaifeng would be regent, he called the new ruler “a serious-minded young fellow, of clean life and irreproachable integrity, and full of sincere zeal for the good of his country.”

The revolutionaries did not take such a magnanimous view. Wang Jingwei, later a turncoat and Japanese collaborator, began to plot against Zaifeng along with a small assassination corps. The group decided to plant a bomb beneath a bridge that Zaifeng crossed every day.

Because of technical problems, the hapless group labored for three nights to set up the bomb, and on the third night, police discovered it.

Arrested and brought before Zaifeng, the melodramatic

SOONG AI-LING, SITTING BETWEEN HER TWO SISTERS, WAS ONE OF THE FIRST CHINESE WOMEN EVER TO BE EDUCATED IN THE UNITED STATES

THE SHANGHAI LADY OF TASTE

Photograph

by

CFP

SOONG AI-LING

“There were three sisters,” goes an old Maoist saying. “One loved power, one loved money, and one loved China.” But the Soong sisters were more complicated than that. Ai-ling, the “money lover,” began her career as a devoted supporter of the Republican revolution, only later embracing the good life.

Soong Ai-ling ( 宋 霭 龄 ) was born into a Shanghai merchant family in 1890, the daughter of a self-made, American-educated banker and printer. The family were staunch Christians, and Ai-ling made her first trip to America at the age of 14 in the company of missionaries. On the way, she was detained in San Francisco by the immigration authorities and shuffled between various boats for several weeks. President Theodore Roosevelt later asked her what she thought of America, and she described her experience with the authorities. “Why should a Chinese girl be kept out of a country if it is so free?” she asked a flustered TR. Determined that his children should get both Chinese and American educations, Ai-ling’s father sent her to Wesleyan College in Georgia.

She was one of the first Chinese women ever to be educated in the United States. Returning to China, Ai-ling found that her American experience aroused suspicion, and in the words of a biographer, she “fell victim to a sort of stage fright that would accompany her for many years.”

After the Wuchang Uprising brought Sun Yat-sen back from America, Soong Ai-ling became his secretary, and she spent the Xinhai Revolution at the center of the evolving government. Ai-ling soon married a banker who claimed descent from Confucius, her sister Ching-ling married Sun Yat-sen himself, and the third sister Mei-ling married— who else—Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek.

By 1942, the three Soong sisters were the glamorous face of Republican China. When their youngest brother finally tied the knot in 1942, Life Magazine called them “one of the greatest families in the world …with a reputation for marrying wisely and well.” China’s troubles later pulled the family apart, with Ai-ling living a lavish life in America and Ching-ling defecting to the PRC. Mei-ling, the youngest, lived out her days as “Madame Chiang,” painting in New York City and dying peacefully in 2003 at the age of 105 in her Manhattan apartment.

Issue 5/2011

THE WARLORD CAI E

Cai E (蔡锷) was every inch the dashing young military man in 1911. He looks the part in his photos, decked out in brassy regalia and topped with a flamboyant feathery plume. But far from a conservative Qing loyal, Cai was a visionary who dedicated his life to revolution.

Born in Hunan, Cai imagined as a young man that his home province would carry China into the future, “giving new life to China, just as England and France have done for the Roman Empire,” according to a letter he published in 1903. “Hunan is a province, and England and France are countries, but that is the only difference between them.”

Cai believed that Hunan’s strong military would make such marvels possible, and later he decided the army should be used to reform all of China. He studied abroad at a famous military academy in Tokyo, and was inspired by the German example. Back in China, Cai became a general and found himself leading units in Yunnan in 1911.

新青年 封

NEW YOUTH MAGAZINE

面 故 事

COVER STORY

40

“The function of youth in society is the same as that of a fresh and vital cell in a human body.” So wrote Chen Duxiu in “Call to Youth”—one of the first articles ever to appear in his provocative new journal, New Youth. It was 1915, four years after the Xinhai Revolution, and China was still reeling from the aftershock. In these tumultuous, idealistic years, discussion and debate roiled among China’s young thinkers as to what their new nation should look like. It was this that led to New Youth (《新青年》), a revolutionary magazine aimed at jumpstarting political discussions and promoting new ideas.

Urged on by Chen, a socialist who had spent several years abroad, the magazine railed against traditional culture, with its elitist, Confucian values, advocating instead a more “modern” system that valued democracy, science, egalitarianism, gender equality—and, increasingly, Marxism. With an immense circulation, New Youth proved instrumental in defining the dialogue of the Chinese left, with many of its writers going on to become leading figures in the Communist Party. Four years after its founding, New Youth would play a key role in fomenting the May 4th Movement, an event that radicalized the nation, moving it away from Western-style democracy toward Chinese Communism.

When the revolution broke out, Cai E declared Yunnan’s independence, becoming the leader of an authoritarian government there at the age of 29. For a while he wanted to turn Southwest China into a “new Prussia,” but eventually he submitted to the authority of the central government, returning to a ceremonial post in Beijing.

Legend says that a lovely Beijing prostitute, Xiao Fengxian (小凤仙 ), helped inspire Cai E to oppose Yuan Shikai, the President of the Republic of China, when he attempted to revive the monarchy with himself as emperor. Cai E escaped from Beijing, declared Yunnan’s independence again, and led a series of military maneuvers that “liberated” province after province from Yuan’s government, finally leading to its downfall.

In a letter dated 1915, George E. Morrison, the famed Peking correspondent for The Times of London described Cai as “an intelligent young man, educated in Japan, whom many of the Young China Party regard as a future President of China.” It was not to be—Cai E fell ill in 1916, and died in Japan that same year.

THE FOREIGNER

ARTHUR DE CARLE SOWERBY For today’s expats, the China of the 1990s seems like pioneer times. Oh, those quaint souls who thrilled at the taste of imported iceberg lettuce, who shopped at old-timey trading posts with names like “Friendship Store!”

Foreigners like Arthur de Carle Sowerby, born in Taiyuan in 1885 to Baptist missionary parents, had to contend with more serious problems—for example, the threat of being massacred. Sowerby himself narrowly escaped this fate as a child: his Baptist missionary family was on furlough in England during the Boxer Rebellion, and so he was not among the 8,000 Christians killed in Taiyuan at the time.

Returning to Taiyuan in 1905, young Sowerby was determined to explore the vast, desolate expanse of north China. Few foreigners at the time ever left their designated

EARS WERE DELIVERED IN BASKETS TO MERCENARY HEADQUARTERS TO BE COUNTED

foreigners already killed. “The effect of all this,” wrote Sowerby, “was to keep the road ahead of us clear of all bandits, and whenever we approached a walled city the local militia would turn out and salute us as we rode by.”

The group advanced through burned-out villages, picking up stragglers and rescuing missionaries and damsels in distress. Just like today’s foreigners, on Christmas Day they put together a pathetic celebration that included an improvised tree and “a very fair imitation of a plum pudding.” Narrowly skirting hostilities between revolutionaries and imperial forces, the group somehow reached a Peking-bound train, ending a 49-day adventure. The missionaries cast gold medals for each of the nine brave, lucky men who had taken part in “Sowerby’s Light Horse.”

So much adventure left Arthur immobilized by arthritis at a young age, so in 1922 he settled in Shanghai and, along with his wife, founded The China Journal, a magazine aimed at foreigners that hoped to “encourage an active enthusiasm for the powerful and often enigmatic Chinese self-contained culture.” He wrote on every subject, from hunting in Manchuria to “Shanghai’s Position in the World.” Though a colonialist who shared the prejudices of his time, Sowerby was driven by some of the same passions that inspire us at The World of Chinese. We’re glad his tales have survived a century of revolutions to reach us intact.

CHINESE YOU NEED

to revolt

f2np3n

反叛

He is a fighter at heart.

T` n-ix~n sh# ge d7ush#.

他内心是个斗士。 fighter

d7ush#

斗士 idealistic

assassination

l@xi2ng zh^y# de

The president was assassinated.

Z6ngt6ng b-i 3nsh` le.

理想主义的

总统被暗杀了。

3nsh`

暗杀

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41 COVER STORY

Treaty Ports, but Arthur was different. “He is one of those men for whom the old country has insufficient elbowroom,” wrote a colleague in 1913. “He is essentially a man for wide spaces and untrammeled ways.” On his first journey into the Ordos Desert, he discovered a new species of kangaroo rat. Empress Dowager Cixi died while he was away on a pioneering expedition in Gansu, an ominous sign of events to come.

In the autumn of 1911, 26-year-old Sowerby was preparing an expedition to Mongolia for the Smithsonian Museum, gathering provisions and ammunition as word of the Wuchang Uprising arrived. Revolutionaries in the provinces were unprepared for insurrection. The resulting chaos in Shaanxi Province presented an opportunity for a shadowy group called the Elder Brother Society, which shared little with the revolutionaries apart from fierce hatred of the Manchu Dynasty.

Violence, looting and anarchy took hold in Shaanxi, trapping the area’s many Christian missionaries, who feared for their lives. Manchus in the capital of Xi’an were massacred, and their ears were delivered in baskets to mercenary headquarters to be counted.

Sowerby, a pathological optimist, decided to rescue Shaanxi’s foreigners, and set off into the hostile country with a motley band of nine men. Rumors circulated ahead of the group, until the Chinese believed a column of 2,000 British troops were advancing to avenge the deaths of

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I DIDN’T FOR COVER STORY

B Y L I Z T U N G ( 董怡) A N D P A U L C U C L I S P H O T O G R A P H S B Y L J ( 刘姜)

C

ounterculture has always been a game for the young—the poetic and rebellious, the radical, the novel, the abrasive, the transcendent. Think Bob Dylan, Lou Reed and Andy Warhol. In their youth, they all had the energy and the gall to create without fear, even and especially if it meant smashing age-old ideas. Since the beginning of the economic reforms, China, too, has seen the emergence of a motley group of youth subcultures, groups like rockers, punks, hippies, skaters, even skinheads—in other words, all the anti-mainstream countercultures that permeate other consumer-driven societies.

In China, the advent of the internet has put this growth into overdrive, as thousands of young people connect over their shared search for an alternative to the increasingly consumer-driven mainstream. That search can be boiled down to one goal: making art that is not for money, not for their parents, not for their teachers, but for themselves.

In a bid to explore some of the faces of China’s youth underground, we talked to three artists who, despite their creative and personal differences, share an exuberance and creative audacity that capture the spirit of these burgeoning communities.

C at chi n g u p w i t h t he yo u t h o f C h i n a' s c o u n t e rc u l t u re s 中国当代年轻人的亚文 化——不为装酷，只 为做自己喜欢的事情。

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MAKE IT YOU

LUCI FER MUSICIAN - AGE 23

Pure of heart an d demented of brai n , R u st i c frontman Lucife r su f fe re d for years before e m e r g i n g as one of China’s m o st compelling rock art i st s

I

was sitting outside a show, flanked by bored-looking kids in skinny jeans and leather jackets, when I saw him: a multi-colored vision in pin stripes and polka dots. He bounded over and slapped my friend hello on the shoulder. They exchanged a few words, and then he zipped off, blazer flowing like a cape, all tussled hair and cherubic smiles.

“Who was that?” I asked my friend.

“Oh him?” he said. “That’s Lucifer.”

By the time I met him in 2010, Lucifer and his band Rustic had already made a name for themselves in China with their upset win of the Global Battle of the Bands, an international competition in which bands contend for prize money and a victory tour. Though the actual winnings were moderate, it was

a major personal victory for the then-21-year-old Lucifer, who— belying his buoyant personality and equally peppy taste-the-rainbow outfits—has undergone more personal trials for his music than some artists experience in a lifetime.

Lucifer (whose real name is Li Yan) grew up the younger son of two small business owners in Shijiazhuang, the capital of Hebei Province. Though he studied guitar and clarinet as a child, his interest in music didn’t catch fire until he was 14 or 15, when he, along with his friend Li Fan, attended their first punk festival. It was a life-changing experience.

“We had never seen music that was so energetic, so raw,” Lucifer says, his voice still filling with awe. He and Li Fan decided then and there to start a band.

Around the same time, Lucifer started discovering rock music on the internet. Already initiated into Chinese rock by his brother’s old cassettes, YouTube introduced him to pop-punk bands like Greenday and Sum41. And then he found Joyside.

“I saw their music video and I thought, wow—this is a Chinese band and they can do it as cool as the bands I was worshipping from overseas. They were popular in Beijing, and it really made me feel like, I can do this too.”

While this might seem like a common enough dream for a teenager, in China—where rock music has a much shorter history and lesser

“UNDERGROUND MUSIC IS LIKE A VIRGIN… LIKE A GIRL WHO KNOWS NOTHING AND IS BEAUTIFUL.”

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presence—it marked Lucifer as an outsider. When he left home at 16 to complete high school a few towns away, Lucifer found that he had become an outcast.

“I don’t know why it was like this,” Lucifer says. “I wanted to be the one, you know, when the class is over everyone is there smiling and you are smiling too. But I’m always not that one.” Part of it, he says, was a personality clash; while Lucifer was interested in music, all of the boys in his school spent most of their free time thinking about girls. And then, there was the way he looked.

“Part of it was my clothes,” Lucifer admits. Ever since he was a kid, he’d been dressing up (with the help of his mother and her retrowear) in the kind of flamboyant outfits he’d seen rockers wearing in music videos.

In the world of conformity that is high school, this marked Lucifer as an outsider. After less than a week living in the dorms, Lucifer moved out and found a cheap room in town. It had no kitchen, the shower was broken and it was drafty in the winter—but Lucifer was happy. “I didn’t feel poor, I felt cool. I felt like, ‘you guys live in the dorms, that’s boring. I’m somewhere else, I can go wherever.’”

This gave Lucifer a break from his classmates and the freedom to begin gigging with his band. It was this (along with the encouragement of a Tom Waits-loving foreign friend) that sustained Lucifer throughout high school, until he made his escape to Beijing.

Though his grades were poor, Lucifer’s talent at the clarinet earned him a spot at Peking Opera and Arts Institute. For Lucifer, it was an excuse to come to China’s music capital with his parents’ blessing. There, he started playing again with his band, and just a year later won the Global Battle of the Bands. These days, the

band is signed to indie label Maybe Mars and continues to gig around Beijing and China.

Despite the band’s success, Lucifer says his parents remain cool to the idea of rock music, which to them is a dangerous distraction to Lucifer’s studies and job training. And they may have a point—in China, even the most successful rock bands can’t make any money off their music. As Lucifer sees it, this isn’t a problem; it’s just the nature of making art.

“I never dreamed of being a star,”

Lucifer says. “I don’t care about being rich; I don’t like rich people too.”

This, according to him, is a key part of what it means to be underground.

“I feel like underground music is the music that doesn’t need marketing.

It is the music that isn’t made up by business. It’s naked like a virgin… like a girl who knows nothing and is beautiful.”

Does he think they’re underground?

Lucifer looks at me earnestly “Rustic,” he says. “It’s a naked name, no?”

AND-C GRAFFITI ARTIST - AGE 25

AND-C gav e up a st abl e job and conv ent i o n al l i fe to pursue his passi o n — g raf fiti with a m e ssa g e

I

t was while wandering into a seemingly empty parking garage in Beijing that I discovered a multicolored army of devils, monkeys and swollen faces glaring down at me with such intensity that the walls seemed to pulsate with raw emotion. These ghoulish works got me hooked, and after some investigation I was pointed in the direction of AND-C; a member of a graffiti group that was apparently “breaking the cusp of new school graffiti.”

Sitting in AND-C’s combination crash pad/studio, I looked past the shelves filled with spray paint cans towards the canvas version of his favorite work. A morbid character with a flamethrower stood torching a skull strewn background; the weapon’s nozzle spitting a fiery torrent of script. The painting’s dark complexity compelled me to ask the question that had been on my mind since I’d

started paying attention to graffiti: why would someone dedicate so much time, money and effort to an art form that is not only underappreciated, but discouraged?

“Graffiti gives me the patience to explore myself,” says AND-C after careful consideration. “And I like the feeling of doing it; it makes me happy.” While 25-year-old’s answer may sound like a youth’s idealistic response, he has had to fight for his art every step of the way.

Recognizing graffiti as an art form is a subject of controversy the world over, but in China, most residents are still baffled as to why anyone would create the street art in the first place. When questioning the average passerby on the street, most reply, “I don’t understand graffiti, so I don’t have an opinion on it.”

“I think Chinese graffiti cultures are still at an early stage,” says AND-C, “Most people who like graffiti are related to the arts. The locals don’t know much about this culture.”

Though China has no laws that explicitly forbid graffiti, the artist has been stopped many times by pedestrians who try to chase him off or call the police.

Little do these locals know, AND-C is trying to take an active role in improving the community. One of AND-C’s primary motivations is to use his graffiti to outline important social issues. I asked if this applied to the man with the flamethrower, which to me seemed more like a senseless nightmare than a call for positive action. “We used negative imagery such as a red sky, skulls, butchers and so on to frame environmental importance” AND-C explains. Environmental awareness, he says, is a growing theme in his work. These messages, publicized by large scale events such as “More Than + Pop Art Festival”, help

set the focus on the more pressing concerns in China today.

In addition to the constant battle of gaining recognition in the local community, the graffiti artist has also had opposition to his work a little closer to home. AND-C recounts his family’s initial reaction to his work with a faint smile. “To start with, my parents did not understand why I would choose to scrawl on the street.

They punished me many times with the hope that I would get a stable job.”

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“I DO NOT CARE WHAT OTHER PEOPLE THINK. I’LL STILL SPRAY DOWN.” Issue 5/2011

Eventually, he decided to compromise by graduating university with a degree in design, getting a job working for the CCTV network, and all the while continuing to spray graffiti. Soon, however, it became clear that he would have to choose between his passion and a more stable career. The decision, he seemed to imply, was obvious: “I did not have time to go paint graffiti, so I resigned and set up the current studio.”

Though his family was at first less than enthused about this decision, they eventually came to respect AND-C’s choice. “The family still doesn’t understand it,” says AND-C’s brother-in-law at a later graffiti event, “but we are trying to understand it, and Chen’s sister and I go to these

events to learn about it for the family.”

AND-C has noticed the change, and says that his family is now fully supportive of his work.

Though AND-C’s family and the art community are beginning to appreciate the growing graffiti scene in Beijing, Chinese graffiti artists have a long uphill battle ahead of them before they gain the respect of the average local. As exhibitions and various events make his graffiti art increasingly difficult to ignore, I asked AND-C if a negative response from the community would bother him. Flashing a mischievous grin, he responded defiantly, “I do not care what other people will think of me when I do graffiti; I’ll still spray down. Hah!”

CHAIR MAN CA “I COMIC ARTIST - AGE 27

Gr u esome, whim si c al and absurd, Chai r m an Ca’s work has pl ac e d him at the vang u a rd o f Chinese comic art

don’t want to be a plate of cherry tomatoes!” weeps the girl, who is pretty except for the olive-sized pustules pushing out from the side of her face. A world away, a yellow-skinned Venus with red penis-wings rides a lobster out of the surf. On subways, gangs of demure, uniformed school girls threaten commuters with daggers, while goblin-faced, greasercoiffed rockers fighting zombies and each other.

Visceral, funny, sexual, nightmarish— this is the world of Chairman Ca, the reigning king of Chinese underground comics. Like a lot of people, I first encountered Ca’s work through posters advertising rock shows. Plastered around music venues and the walls of hip Beijing neighborhoods, the posters were a tangle of spidery, grotesque figures that seemed to beckon the city’s young

and weird into their land of chaos.

I began to imagine Ca like one of his characters—demented, sneering, hollow-cheeked.

Yet, when the 27-year-old Ca greeted us at the door of his apartment in northwest Beijing, he looked less like the dark surrealist I’d imagined as he did a kindly, eccentric uncle. Dressed in a loosefitting Hawaiian shirt, glasses and an Old West-badguy-style mustache, Ca swept us into his spacious living space with a jovial, “Come in!”

This was not what we expected from the man whose drawings look like a rendering of the devil’s id. But then, Ca is no one-trick pony. In addition to his posters, Ca is also widely respected for his illustrations and paintings, which feature similarly raw figures that mix a highly stylized, Manga-like aesthetic with the exquisite grotesqueness of art nouveau painters like Schiele. He is perhaps best known, however, for his comics, which he publishes both independently and with his like-minded coterie, the Cult Youth Collective.

Arguably the first generation of underground comic artists in China, Cult Youth formed around 2006 when the future members met on a drawing forum. After exchanging some of their work, the group found that they shared a common (or rather, uncommon) sensibility, and soon decided to collaborate on a book.

“It was very spontaneous,” Ca says.

“When someone proposed making a book together, everyone thought this was totally awesome so we just did it.

We didn’t think about it too much, there was no motive behind it.”

Though Ca is reluctant to ascribe much underlying meaning to the collective or its work, a 2010 documentary on Cult Youth offers up a different reading. One of the opening scenes presents a manifesto of

“THE ABSURDITY OF LIFE SURPASSES ANYTHING THAT ART CAN EXPRESS. I WANT TO DISTILL THESE THINGS SO THAT PEOPLE CAN SEE THEM.”

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Issue 5/2011

yielded meanings that even they aren’t fully aware of. “You could say that what they wrote is right, and you could say it isn’t. Maybe it is that after things come out, they give people a certain feeling but the comics’ motivation wasn’t just to do this, it is just the artist’s platform. This book serves as a definition, every artist has his own things he wants to say, this is just the final product of that expression.”

It’s a typically existentialist statement from Ca, whose artistic approach relies heavily on the philosophy, not only in terms of resisting predetermined meaning, but in his reading of reality.

In Ca’s world, neither man nor God stands at the center of the university: there is only absurdity.

“The absurdity of life surpasses anything that art can express,” he says. “What I want to do is distill these things so that people can see them.”

Still, in China there isn’t a huge market for existentialist comics bent

on exposing the horrific absurdity of life. This is why Ca still relies on freelance work and teaching art classes for most of his income, selling his comics for a pittance on Taobao.

“It’s impossible to earn money,” he says. “But as long as you think what you’re doing is right, there’s a desire you want to express, you hope that other people see it, then just make it. I don’t need to be the best, and I’m not a representative of Chinese comics.” He paused for a moment.

“Do you know Wang Di?” I shook my head. “He was one of the early rock musicians. Two days ago on his microblog, he wrote, ‘200 years ago, youth culture was in the hands of young people. But now in 2010, 2011, youth culture has been taken over by people who just want to make money.

We don’t want to do too much, so they won’t care about us.’” He flicked some ash from his cigarette and looked at me. “Do you understand?”

COVER STORY

sorts that declares Cult Youth’s work a definitive statement of 80s youth and anti-mainstream values: “If you weren’t born in the 80s, you have no way of understanding these comics.

They’re not made for you,” reads the statement. “What’s important to them is to say ‘f you’ to celebrities and to dogma. And stick out the middle finger to the generic masses.”

When I asked Ca about the statement, he was at first dismissive.

“I don’t really care—I don’t need to care,” he said immediately. “Saying I don’t care is like expressing the same thing in my artwork.” He brushed off the notion that people who weren’t born in the 80s couldn’t understand Cult Youth’s work. “Other people can understand. I think this is just a selling point, a slogan, but I think it’s really stupid—just a way to sell more books.”

Ca did allow that although the group never intended their work as a generational statement, it may have