Following up on my last post, just below, I just found this China Daily story that suggests the collectivist/spiritualist (Korchagin?) tendency among Chinese youth may not be as strong as the Party pollsters had hoped:

Students look down upon grassroots work
(Reuters/chinadaily.com.cn)
Updated: 2006-12-15 20:54

BEIJING –
College graduates were reluctant to work in the vast countryside to improve the lot
of farmers despite the Chinese government’s push based on the idealism of youth, Xinhua news agency
said on Friday.

China, which struggles to find jobs for millions of new graduates leaving
universities annually, is encouraging them to spend time working in the
economically underdeveloped countryside as teachers, nurses and in other skilled
jobs.

But efforts appear to be floundering, the official news agency said
in an opinion piece, even as hundreds of students vie for desirable
urban jobs such as civil servants.

It said Beijing should offer policy support and improve work conditions for
the graduates, but made no concrete suggestions.

It is all a far cry from the days of the
1966-76 Cultural Revolution, when millions of Chinese students "went down" to the countryside to
learn from the peasants. Many went willingly, though, out of revolutionary zeal.

    I just love that line: "despite the Chinese government’s push based on the idealism of youth."  The youth are not living up to the propaganda image of "idealism" constructed by the Party…
   
      And that odd turn of phrase – "went down"!  We usually refer to those young people as "sent down" youth: they were sent, often with little choice in the matter.  Now, of course, there was a good deal of idealism during the Cultural Revolution.  Many young people truly believed they were engaging in a revolutionary transformation of Chinese culture and society.  But it is precisely the crushing frustration of that youthful idealism that created the "crisis of faith" that demanded a clear move away from Cultural Revolutionary political manipulation and an embrace of "reform and opening."    It strikes me as ironic, to say the least, that the Party (or at least some writer at the Xinhua news agency) would invoke the Cultural Revolution to shame contemporary youth.  We really don’t want to go back there, do we?

    I am not going to jump on the bandwagon and condemn urban young people for being insufficiently idealistic, or unwilling to throw away their opportunities to earn more money in the cities.  That is just the way life is now.  Of course, there will be some altruistic souls who give their lives over to the betterment of those less fortunate than themselves.  And that’s great.  But I don’t think we should take that personal moral impulse and project it onto all Chinese youth.  Indeed, many of those seemingly selfish urban-dwellers might contribute positively to rural living standards through their remittances back to the villages where their parents and family members live.  Let’s not cast a blanket judgment.

     There might be a bigger point in all of this.  When we think about the contemporary moment and how ancient ideas might apply to modern issues, we need to recognize that we live in a globally competitive, capitalist world-economy that shapes many of our personal choices and social practices.  If women, say, chose to opt out of having children because they feel they need to maximize their career goals now rather than later, we should not condemn them outright.  Rather, we should think of ways to make family life easier to manage, in a modern context, to reduce the tensions between raising children and work. 

     There never was an "ideal" past – each historical moment has its own injustices and inhumanities – and our present is not somehow worse than our ancestors’ experience.  We are always confronted with conflicting pressures and difficult ethical choices.  Particular outcomes can only be judged in terms of the immediate circumstances that surrounded an individual.   Mencius has a nice way of putting int:

When you speak of virtues others lack, think of the trials you may yet endure. (144)

     That comes pretty close to the "judge not lest ye be judged" notion in Matthew, doesn’t it?  And maybe that is what we should keep in mind as we watch Chinese young people navigate an extraordinarily competitive and uncertain social and economic world.