UCLA UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Improvised Lives: Individualization, Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood in Rural China Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8t07j035 Author Strickland, Michael Publication Date 2012 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Improvised Lives: Individualization, Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood in Rural China A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology by Michael Strickland 2012 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Improvised Lives: Individualization, Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood in Rural China by Michael Strickland Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology University of California, Los Angeles, 2012 Professor Yunxiang Yan, Chair The youth of China in recent decades have borne the brunt of rapid social change. Those born in the 1980s and early 1990s, and who came of age in the early 21st century, grew up under conditions not merely different from those known to earlier generations, but conditions that were radically new for China. This much is no surprise, having already been witnessed and commented upon by any number of researchers and scholars and with increasing frequency since the start of China's Reform Era in 1978. These observations, however, have often come piecemeal, and what has been most lacking is a more precise and theoretically coherent understanding of youth experience. In this dissertation I draw on individualization theory to examine the collective experiences of a number of rural Chinese ii youth as they made their way into adulthood in the early 2000s. Looking by turns at the environment in which they grew up, their struggles to find jobs and get ahead, their choices in marriage, their fixation on material comfort and success, and the fraying and diffusion of their social ties, this text seeks to build a portrait of a particular group of youth, and through them depict and describe a systematic change in Chinese society. The road to adulthood for Chinese youth is no longer what it once was; traditional models and structures have fallen away, with new and unfamiliar structures arising in their place; old norms have been upended or, where they still stand, can no longer be met by the same means as before. The result of all of this is that young Chinese have greater personal freedom than ever, and yet also less security. And if they hope to meet the ideals of life success that they, their families, and Chinese society at large holds out for them, then there are no set paths to follow, and they must improvise their own way forward. iii The dissertation of Michael Strickland is approved. Karen Brodkin Nancy Levine Cindy Fan Yunxiang Yan, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2012 iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract of the Dissertation ii List of figures vii Acknowledgments viii Vita ix Introduction 1 The research population 8 The research setting 17 Dissertation overview 24 Chapter One | Geographies of Modernity 27 Individualization and Tradition in Rural China Individualization, existential risk, and the self-scripted biography 31 Defining Jiaxiang 43 The differential geography of individualization 53 Concluding remarks 60 Chapter Two | The New Chaos of Work 64 Strategic Education and the Instability of Employment The strangeness of modern education 67 Individualizing structures of the school system 75 External risks, internal uncertainties 90 Concluding remarks 103 Chapter Three | Free Love 105 Individual Desire and Social Necessity in Marriage Choices The balance of tradition and modernity 110 Structural pressures, incentives, and the marriage market 119 Refusal, acceptance, and choice 127 Stepping outside of the normative boundary 136 v Concluding remarks 142 Chapter Four | The Material Life 144 Individual Materialism and Political Disaffection Materialism as individualization 150 Informed desires and lived realities 164 Materialism as ideology 177 Concluding remarks 184 Chapter Five | Making Friends 186 The Individualization of Friendship The current state of friendship 190 Invisible webs of support 195 Individualized friendship 200 Concluding remarks 213 Conclusion 215 Bibliography 230 vi LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Percentage of middle school students who continued to high school, nationwide: 81 Figure 2: Percentage of high school students who continued on to higher education, nationwide: 87 Figure 3: Jining Urban Household Average Annual Consumer Expenditures, 2009: 100 Figure 4: Preparation for a 15 km cycling race, Jiaxiang: 163 Figure 5: Kitchen in rented apartment, essentially unequipped and unused: 168 Figure 6: Model kitchen for a luxury apartment, Jining: 169 Figure 7: Living quarters, rented apartment in Taian: 173 Figure 8: Living quarters, rented apartment in Qingdao: 174 Figure 9: Living quarters, rented apartment in Jining: 175 vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Many lent me their support over the course of fieldwork and the writing of the dissertation; more, in fact, than I can ever name. Yet above all I must thank my advisor Yunxiang Yan, as well as my other committee members Karen Brodkin, Nancy Levine, and Cindy Fan; I am grateful to all of them for their support, their patience, and their wisdom. I wish also to thank Rebekah Park for her generous and tireless encouragement as I labored through the writing, and Ann Walters for her gracious and indispensable support on countless occasions over the years. I am grateful as well as to Diao Tongju and several of her colleagues for their very kind assistance when I began my fieldwork. And, finally, I am eternally grateful to my many friends in China who gave their support in so many ways, including Cai Jiehao, Jiang Manyun, Guo Xukun, Guo Jiubing, Deng Jianyong, Gao Guangrui, and innumberable others. viii VITA 2004 B.A. Anthropology and East Asian Studies New York University New York, New York 2006 Teaching Assistant University of California, Los Angeles Los Angeles, California 2007 M.A. Anthropology University of California, Los Angeles Los Angeles, California 2008-2011 Fieldwork Jining, Shandong, PR China Publications —. 2010. “Aid and Affect in the Friendships of Young Chinese Men.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 16(1): 102–118. ix Introduction Most fieldwork projects probably do not end quite as they began, and this one was no excep- tion. My research began in the fall of 2008, and over the course of the project my objectives gradually evolved until, by the end of it, the research had turned from questions about friendship and sociality among young people to the lives of Chinese youth as they were making the circuitous transition into adulthood. It was, ultimately, about young people and their everyday lives, their goals and pressures. It was about their searches for jobs, their anxi- eties about marriage or whether or not they would be able to afford to buy a house. It was about the way they whiled away the hours with friends and tried to sort out their present and future lives. The results of that research, and what they have to say about the greater structural changes in Chinese society, political economy, and modernity, constitute the body of this dissertation. But as I said, this was not how the research project started. Here in 1 this introduction, I wish to step back and give a brief assessment of the project as a whole, to explain how it began, how it changed, and the ultimate form that it took. The original proposal for my dissertation project was for a focused study of friend- ship ties among young people, and more specifically young men, in rural and semi-rural China. This was not a topic that I had chosen casually; it was, in fact, a direct outgrowth of my prior work on fictive kinship, and modern practices of sworn brotherhood specifically. In the spring and summer of 2005, I taught English at a small medical college in Shandong province, China, and there I met a young man named Taishi Jiang.1 One day he began to tell me of his five “brothers.” These were not genetically related kin, as it turned out, but jieyi xiongdi, or sworn brothers. This was the very first time that I had ever heard of this particu- lar phenomenon, an ancient but still extant practice in many parts of China. Taishi Jiang later invited me to visit his hometown, a place called Jiaxiang in the southwest of the province. There I began to meet and make connections with some of his acquaintances and old friends, including his five brothers. As that summer ended I left for the U.S. to begin my graduate studies, but the next summer I returned to China, first to the same college I had taught at before and then to Jiaxiang, where I conducted a short-term fieldwork project on sworn brotherhood. In the course of that project I became interested in the friendships that my mostly young, mostly male subjects were involved in. Sworn brotherhood, after all, is a variety of close and intimate friendship, but regardless of whether or not young men had sworn broth- ers, their peers and friends played a manifestly important part in their lives. Friends were 1 All personal names used throughout are of course pseudonyms. 2 sources of emotional support, certainly, but also sources of badly needed material support as well. When a young man could not do something himself, when he needed money, when something was troubling him, or even when he simply was bored or lonely and wanted to kill time, it was often to his friends that he would turn. These perfectly ordinary relationships are both ubiquitous and indispensable in most people's lives, and yet remain sadly underthe- orized in anthropology. After what I had found in my study of sworn brotherhood, and after a wide-ranging review of the relatively scant literature on friendship in anthropology, sociology, psychol- ogy, and other fields, I was confronted with an evergrowing list of questions that, eventually, became the targets of the research project.