Youth (青年, qingnian) as a subject has been a key element in the ideal of national rejuvenation since the beginning of the twentieth century-from the May Fourth Movement to the Communist Revolution, from the Cultural Revolution to the 1989 Democracy Movement (Song 2016; for a discussion of the ambiguity of biological and sociological categorisations of youth, see Lanza 2012). Over the past decade, different but interacting discourses on the history, definition, and role of youth have emerged and sometimes clashed, including the normative-prescriptive discourse of the Party-State, the productive and hedonistic discourse of the market, and the discourse of societal autonomy and heterogeneity. In his article 'World Factory', Christopher Connery (2020) proposed defining the decade from 2005 to 2015 as the 'post-WTO era'-a useful periodisation forThe ideas expressed in this essay draw from an article entitled 'Beyond "Rising Tides" and "Lying Flat": Emergent Cultural Practices among Youth in Urban China', forthcoming in the 2022 spring issue of CLC Web: Comparative Literature and Culture.
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