Between the Individualism and the Collectivism: Dilemma in the Socialization of Today's Chinese Adolescents

About one hundred years ago, William Bagley put forward several controversial issues on different trends of education concepts. One of them concerns the debate between two opposite values in pedagogy: the individualism and the collectivism. If these two values represent and distinguish two different notions in diverse civilizations, especially during this transitional stage and the context of globalization, today’s Chinese youths are the first generation whom simultaneously contact with various cultures from the Western world and from their own tradition, thus directly confronting this dilemma during their socialization.

On one hand, Chinese social convention attaches importance to the strategies needed in maintaining a collective life, in which individuals should adhere to Doctrine of the Mean in hopes of becoming invisible within the community; On the other hand, the competition advocated by market economy require individuals to show their uniqueness in order to stand out above others. Moreover, the Confucian family tradition is used to emphasize that an individual submits to the collective interests but disfavors his or her public responsibilities. However, civil society introduced from western cultures, stresses the importance of the individual but, meanwhile, promotes integration into the communal solidarity and the sense of civic duties. Today’s Chinese youth is growing up in this very conflict and the amalgamation of these paradoxical values.

How then, do they evaluate their own identities and their family relationships? How do they consider their civic responsibilities and their social connections? Which values represent, for them, justice in their own lives and others’? By means of a survey focusing on adolescents and conducted in a Chinese city, we try to discover, by quantitative and qualitative analyses, the inclination and the hesitation of this young generation facing the obligation of the familial collectivist tradition with that of the impacts of the individualist civic innovation.