The New Radicals

[s1eve]

from TimeAsia:

Young and restless linglei are breaking ranks and rules in a search for personal liberation. But they choose their battles carefully.

http://www.time.com/time/asia/magazine/article/0,13673,501040202-582466,00.html

Excerpt:

A bleary dusk is descending on Beijing's Haidian district, and four lanes of taxis, fume-belching diesel trucks and the occasional horse-drawn cart are snarled in bumper-to-bumper gridlock. Suddenly, on a bicycle path running parallel to the main road, a silver Toyota Celica shifts into high gear and races past the river of red brake lights. Han Han, as usual, has found a shortcut, and as he careens past the Mao-jacketed grannies pedaling home, he pauses for a moment of self-reflection. "In China today, there are many different paths to fulfillment," he says, adjusting his sunglasses and narrowly averting a pedicab piled high with computer parts. "There's no reason to stay on the normal, boring road when there are so many other ways to do things."

Dressed in a black leather jacket so oversized that the sleeves cover his hands, Han isn't exactly channeling James Dean or a young Bob Dylan. But the high school dropout, who at age 17 wrote The Third Way, a best-selling novel excoriating China's hidebound education system, is the embodiment of disaffected mainland youth, a long-haired 21-year-old racing to define himself through fast cars and shopworn anti-establishment symbolism. Han taps his lucrative book royalties to indulge a serious addiction to auto rallies, in which he participates around the country with his five cars, among them a $50,000 Mitsubishi. For Han, a ribbon of open asphalt means more than just a Kerouac-like aimlessness. For decades the mobility of Chinese citizens was severely restricted, and the freedom to move is nothing short of revolutionary. "It's my choice to do what I want and go where I want," he says. "Nobody can tell me what to do."


Continue at: http://www.time.com/time/asia/magazine/article/0,13673,501040202-582466,00.html

http://i.timeinc.net/time/asia/magazine/2004/0202/alt_china.jpg
The Writer Chun Shu, 20
A high school dropout and daughter of a P.L.A. officer, Chun recently bared her soul—and her love life—in the best-selling novel Beijing Doll

[Faithless]

That picture doesn't look like one of a Han Han.

As I'm reading the article, I don't get what's the advantage to "dropping out".

Maybe it's just one aspect of this linglei culture. This is very telling --

But the political blindering goes beyond family connections. linglei aren't out to stick it to the Party. They can't, because citizens harboring truly rebellious thoughts remain oppressed. Last year, a college student who posted vaguely pro-democracy musings on the Internet was jailed. So China's new alternatives settle for apolitical self-expression. "Our concept of freedom is different from the West's," explains Chun, pushing her spiky bangs out of her eyes. "We want the physical freedom to travel where we want, work where we want, have the friends we want. But right now we can't be so concerned with spiritual freedom." The possibility of going too far for the comfort of Party overseers is nonetheless omnipresent. After splashy debuts, Chun's two books chronicling the troubles of a Chinese teenager have been banned on the mainland, despite their apolitical stance. Government censors said they were unsuitable and too depressing for young readers. Her editor at a publishing house run by the Foreign Affairs Office has been forced to write Cultural Revolution-style self-criticisms to atone for allowing her last book into print.

And so's this. The linglei culture doesn't sound very radical --

Ask Li what really angers him, and the reply isn't the mass arrests of Falun Gong practitioners or the arbitrary detention of migrant workers or corruption within the Party. No, Li is angriest about how Japan, all those decades ago, stole the Diaoyu Islands from China. "I think I may want to write a song about it," he says. "It's something that moves me."

It's easy, then, to understand why the control-obsessed Party isn't terrified of linglei, why labor camps aren't filled with cliques of neon-hued punk wannabes or herds of dropout Bill Gates types. Superficially, China's linglei are suitably outré: the piercings, the leather jackets, the defiant dropout pose affected even by nerdy kids like IT entrepreneur Wu. But, in many ways, linglei are like dogs wearing electric collars that know just how far they can stray without getting shocked. No one's jumping the invisible fence, because if they do, they might just end up in a gulag. "We're distracted by all these new things, like new clothes or new computer games," says Chun. "It doesn't give us too much time to think about politics."