The New Radicals — page 2

The evolution of a mainland standard of cool is already starting to change China's society in subtle but manifold ways. In marketing, for example, ad campaigns are no longer relying on testimonials about superior function or low price to sell products. Instead, hip imagery is creeping into mainstream media as a promotional tool. In one recent TV spot, the camera pans in on a Chinese yuppie family gathered in its Ikea-style living room. Suddenly the father's new mobile phone with color-screen capability beeps. The family leans in to see what has arrived. It's an SMS picture of the family's son showing off his new hairstyle, a spiky, green-hued halo that perfectly frames his mischievous grin. The message: if you're hip enough to sport a linglei look—or at least have a son who does—then maybe you, too, can own a China Mobile phone with a color screen. "In the 1980s, ads in China focused on the quality of the product," says Sun Yi, a customer supervisor for the Shanghai Weilan Advertising Co. "But starting in the 1990s, ads began focusing on a product's image. For sectors like clothing, electronics and fast food, the most popular image is that of the linglei."

Publishing is another stronghold of linglei chic. Several years ago, China's state publishing houses lost their government subsidies and were forced to become profitable or die. To survive, many turned to publishing quickie biographies of Fortune 500 executives or how-to guides on starting your own business. Others delved into youth culture, figuring that tens of millions of young urban Chinese were an untapped market. The strategy paid off. Over the past three years, linglei literature has topped the best-seller lists. The most successful of all is Han, whose four books have sold more than 2 million copies—a singular achievement in a country where piracy takes a big bite out of book sales.

Chun Shu is another hot young writer, a 20-year-old high school dropout who recently bared her sex life and punk fetish in a best-selling memoir called Beijing Doll. Like most linglei authors, Chun writes bluntly about her own life, but she stays away from the grander ideologies such as democracy, freedom and equality that have often motivated her alternative brethren in the West. In some ways, her aversion to politics isn't surprising, given that her father is a proud People's Liberation Army man, and she's recently moved back home to live in the Wanshou Road Military Family Members' Compound—making her, surely, the only kid on the block to wear a camouflage jacket as an ironic statement.

	My motto is to ignore the police because they control our freedom. —LI YANG, 20   The Punk Rocker

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.

The experience has left Chun with a tiny kernel of resentment, and on an icy night in December, she picks at the scab by associating with her friend, a skinny punk rocker named Li Yang. Li is also 20 years old, and he wears a leather jacket emblazoned with the words POLICE F___ OFF. His favorite band is the Sex Pistols, and as Chun cozies up to him, Li mouths all the right anti-establishment things: "My motto is to ignore the police because they control our freedom."

Li's band, Defect, gathers once a week at sound room No. 421 of the Modern Life Art Institute in a bleak suburb of Beijing. The room is a smoky, claustrophobic space just large enough for a three-man punk band and a screechy set of Great Wall amplifiers. Li grabs the mike and contorts his face into his best Johnny Rotten leer. But Li, for all his sneering and posturing, is hardly a songwriting iconoclast: "Please respect our country/ Because if you don't respect China/ How can you respect us, the people?" "Some bands in the West hate their country so much they hang the flag upside down on the stage," says Li. "We would never do that. We love China." He is, after all, a product of an education filled with what's called "love country" lessons and history texts dwelling on China's humiliation, from defeat in the Opium Wars to Japanese occupation. 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."

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	Bad Company [November 7, 2002] Lost in a moral vacuum, Chinese youths are dropping out of mainstream society and turning to crime A Dose of Reality [February 27, 2003] News Corp. brings cheesy TV to China but can't reach a mass audience—yet A New Chapter [February 3, 2003] Chinese writers are discovering that books have become a tricky business Made in China: The Revenge of the Nerds [June 27, 2001] Somewhere along the line, China became a technocracy More Related Items | Search all issues of TIME Magazine