A New "Me Generation"

By Sandra Burton/Shanghai

On a Friday night in the heart of old Shanghai, the crowd at J.J.'s is working up a postsocialist sweat. Men in suits and ties gyrate with fashionably dressed young women; at small tables newly affluent entrepreneurs sip drinks between calls on cellular phones. The young people at J.J.'s revel in something unprecedented for China: personal and professional liberation. Those with the will and skill to take advantage of economic reform are freer than ever to seek their fortune, their mate and their own identity.

China's "Me generation" is less hostile to the communist regime than indifferent to it. "The government is all around us, but we don't pay attention," says Nie Zheng, 23, a Beijing artist and photographer. That means forfeiting job security and welfare benefits that traditionally bound even artists to the socialist system. But Nie earns enough from free-lance work to pay for Japanese cameras, CDs and designer sunglasses. The parents of Pang Rui, 18, want him to have security as a teacher or a doctor. But the university-bound student from Xian demurs: "I want to be free to earn a lot of money from a job I like."

Zhao Li, 25, one of many who choose to xia hai (plunge into the sea), quit her state-assigned job as an interpreter to work in a foreign-owned public relations firm. Her salary quintupled and she moved into her own two-room apartment. When her parents tell Zhao that her friends are all having children, she replies, "I have no time to be married." Chinese are marrying at a later age, casual premarital sex is more common, and the urban young increasingly choose their own spouses. "It used to be that Communist Party membership was important," said Wang Zhixiong, a Guangdong researcher. "Now people's tastes favor money, professional ranking and appearance."