Contenu du sommaire : Generations and Social Change: Identities, Relationships, and Collective Actions

Among the many slogans and descriptive terms concerning educated youth, “youth without regrets” occupies a special place. On the one hand, it is one of the earliest and best-known slogans about educated youth, and even became a cultural symbol of China in the 1990s. On the other hand, its initial association with educated youth and popularity actually reflect not so much a coincidence as a complicity between the popular and state narratives. This article thus analyses in depth the whole range of issues related to the slogan "youth without regrets": the social context and political reasons for its emergence, the process that led to its popularity, its real meaning, and the common misunderstandings surrounding it, as well as the social, cultural, and political functions hidden behind its popularity.

This paper mobilises interactionist sociology to explore the biographies and moral careers of two former zhiqing who emerged, circa 2007, as well-known mother figures in a dynamic tongzhi blogosphere. Their encounter with young tongzhi inaugurated parental advocacy for their sexually nonconforming children in China. By anchoring tongzhi activism in contemporary Chinese history and reconstructing two parallel processes of activist-becoming, this paper seeks to better understand how political agency emerged in an authoritarian setting while making a case for studying activism as historicised meaning-making activities.

In 2016, a WeChat account called “Beijing Dama Have Something to Say” was created by a small Beijing-based company. Now widely known among retirees throughout China, this platform provides its public – mostly composed of recently retired women born between the late 1940s and the mid-1960s – with hundreds of videos where volunteer retired women speak up in the name of elderly people's interests and spread awareness of their shared difficulties and injustices as a generation. Using ethnographic materials and video content analysis, this paper takes the “Beijing Dama” as a case study to address the development of new forms of “group consciousness” among Chinese retirees, leading them to defend their collective interests online despite China's constraining political environment.

Based on interviews with 120 adult only children and their parents in urban Tianjin, this article shows how grandparenting becomes a crucial site for the intergenerational negotiation around childcare, family obligations, and the unfulfilled aspirations for individualisation. While only child couples rely heavily on their parents for childcare, a lot of tensions are involved in this process. Although grandparents do not always willingly embrace the heavy burden of intergenerational childcare, their concern about elderly care sometimes compels them to nevertheless take up the work. Through providing a nuanced picture of grandparenting in urban China, this article seeks to reveal the changing ideas of family obligation and responsibility, as well as the social transformation in China that underpins such change. It argues that the individualisation process is far from finished, as reality is pulling people back to solve problems within the family.

This article is a contribution to theoretical reflection on the notion of generation applied to the study of youth in Taiwan. Starting from the polysemy of this concept, which has remained problematic for the social sciences since the nineteenth century, it shows that beyond the simple demographic cohort, the young people born in the 1980s and 1990s form a new “actual” generation, in the sense of Mannheim, i.e. characterised by objectively distinctive traits and a generational consciousness that contrasts with their elders. It also seeks to explain the process of formation of this generational consciousness and its implications for political mobilisation.

After a phase of slow development, e-commerce has become widespread in rural China, being promoted by both local governments and corporations. How has it changed business culture and business networks? Based on an ethnographic study conducted in a rural county in Henan, the article explores shifts in patterns of group formation and identity among local businesspeople. Fieldwork included 60 interviews with e-retailers, manufacturers, and local officials, as well as participant observation conducted from 2016 to 2019. The study suggests that online retailing has fostered the emergence of a shared ethos, which values quality and professionalism rather than the ability to build strong interpersonal ties through leisure and credit practices. This new ethos, congruent with state-sponsored, nationwide shifts in the economic structure, entails the emergence of a more far-flung integrated business community, while accentuating local processes of social differentiation.