Sociology of Chinese Youth and Post-Western Theory
The process of socialization for young Chinese has profoundly changed in the last 40 years (Li Peilin, 2015). In a context of surging economic insecurity and precariat, unemployment, poverty and growing inequalities Chinese youth are confronted with manifold double-binds situations, structural deskilling and collective disillusionment. The risk of downward social mobility has affected the young middle-class and has also increased precarity among young people of rural or working-class origins. And internal migrations are producing biographical bifurcations and fragmented identities in a “partial individuation process”(Yan, 2010). Young Chinese internalize the injunction to be “heroes” in a context of “compressed modernity” (Chang, 2017) and an authoritarian regime, exposed to risks faced with flexibility and the injunction to achieve social success. So we can speak about “compressed individuals” facing to collective anxiety (Roulleau-Berger, Su, 2023). The socialization process of young Chinese appears to be particularly complex and dynamic owing to the heterogeneity; we will retain the idea of a plurality of socializations that collide and propagate in the context of compressed modernity
To analyze the compressed socialization process of youth in China, Western sociological theory is not well-adjusted, we should need Post-Western theory (Roulleau-Berger, Li, Kim, Yazawa, 2023), more especially “non-Western” knowledge. It means autonomous knowledge in Chinese sociology but also common knowledge between Western” and “non-Western” sociology to be able to produce a non-hegemonic and dialogic sociology of youth in a process of hybridation of concepts and production of new theoretical approaches.