Time, Space, and Self: Three Cases of Global Youth in China

The emerging field of global youth studies offers insight into young people born after 1990, a time during which the world has been transformed by globalization, including the rapid advance of information and communication technologies (ICTs). In China, however, globalization also means multiple, simultaneous processes of urbanization, industrialization, and modernization. Its younger generations have experienced not only what Harvey called “time-space compression” but, more saliently, the tensions among multiple, co-existing, time-space dynamics. Focusing on three cases drawn from an empirical study, this paper presents Chinese young people’s stories about time, space, and self-expression in this globalized world. The first is about a group of rural-to-urban migrant workers who used flamboyant hairstyles to express their wishes to be seen when the assembly lines of China’s “world factory” have transformed them into standardized, productivity-oriented, machinery appendages with no history and no future. The second case focuses on a Western-educated feminist artist who uses home as a site to illustrate generational clashes about ideas of love, gender norms, and women’s work. The third case looks at a controversial street art project by a group of Chinese international students in Brick Lane in East London, where they bluntly painted a Chinese slogan in a propaganda style. Despite the different experiences and positions of the individuals in the three cases, a common theme is their strong desire to express themselves (in the contexts of, respectively, capitalist production, patriarchy, and Eurocentralism) and the challenges and even impasses, deriving from temporal-spatial discrepancies, in their attempts to communicate with a wide audience. It is concluded that while “global youth” is a concept useful for identifying connections among youth across geographies, more nuanced attention should be paid to their specific life worlds that may have become increasingly divergent rather than convergent.