Drinking games, karaoke songs, and yangge dances: youth cultural production in rural China

Abstract

This article examines the different ways youth in rural Shaanbei, northcentral China participate in cultural production. It explores the media through which young people express themselves and the roles that social institutions (temples, schools, villages, households), modern technologies (video compact discs), and translocal/transnational mass media (satellite and cable TV) play in enabling youth to assert their presence as cultural beings and producers. Shaanbei youth do not choose between modern forms of entertainment (karaoke songs) or traditional forms (playing drinking games), or between institutionally organized activities and those self-initiated to express themselves. (Rural Chinese youth, cultural production, temple festivals, drinking games) ********** Anthropologists have a long-standing interest in studying the socialization of children and processes of enculturation cross-culturally, yet youth culture has largely remained the preserve of sociologists and specialists of popular culture. The study of Western youth culture has its roots in studies of youth social and cultural movements in the 1960s and 1970s: the Hippies, the anti-war protests, Punks, Beatles fans, etc. (Hall and Jefferson 1976; Hebdige 1979; Skelton and Valentine 1998). Youth culture in the West seems to be predicated on a self-conscious, relatively coherent set of mental attitudes and behavioral patterns, often dubbed subcultural or counter-cultural. The most important characteristics of Western urban youth culture are the degree of expressivity (e.g., It's "loud"!) in terms of music, fashion, hairstyle, and manners, and the effort to counter what is perceived to be adult stiffness and conservatism. Though having originated in the West, analytical approaches for studying Western urban youth movements seem to be easily transferable to the Chinese urban context, with the May Fourth Movement and subsequent student culture as prime examples of a self-conscious Chinese urban youth culture. In recent years, the import of rock 'n' roll, disco, hip hop, and rave parties further consolidated and expanded an urban youth style distinct from adult and other cultural productions (Farrer 2002; Moore 2005). (2) One might think that because rural China is portrayed in the media as being impoverished in things cultural (wenhua pinkun), (3) its youth lack the opportunity to have or produce culture. But this depends on where in rural China one looks. In certain parts of rural China, some forms of metropolitan youth culture are emerging since urban cultural forms are rapidly penetrating rural areas, especially along the coast and the peripheries of large cities. In a village near a major urban center (Heilongjiang in northeastern China), Yan (1999) found the local rural youth culture largely derivative of urban popular culture in terms of taste and activities (e.g., billiards, music cassette tapes, printed T-shirts). In Shaanbei, many aspects of youth culture are also drawn from metropolitan pop culture. Although the more education a Shaanbei rural youth receives the more he or she is alienated from village culture and peasant knowledge, the attractiveness of traditional forms of cultural production persists with young people, especially in places like Shaanbei, where such forms of cultural production are still vibrant and popular. Yan (1999) included in his study rural youth's increased consumerism and materialism, increasing premarital sex, the assertion of individual rights and independence, resistance to parents and local state authorities, and a tendency to try new ways of life such as working in the city or traveling. As the focus of this article is on youth cultural production, other aspects of youth life are de-emphasized. Cultural production here refers to the ensemble of mostly expressive cultural activities, and not instrumental activities such as agriculture, employment, and trade. Expressive culture also includes the consumption of cultural products, such as karaoke songs and the necessary accompanying equipment. …