Two nights ago I watched a great documentary on PBS, "Young and Restless in China."  The website for the program is really quite good.  It is possible to watch the whole thing on line, or to just select 10 minute or so segments (the whole thing is about two hours long).  It is really worth it.

    One of the main ideas that comes across, and one that links into my interests, is the cultural and psychological instability created by extraordinarily rapid economic and material change.  The film follows nine different Chinese people, from various social strata but all in their 20s or 30s, over four years as each experiences new opportunities in life.  Clearly, the process of individualization is a powerful part of each of their lives.  The new economy and society encourages them to develop their personal talents and interests and to strike out on their own, however much that may sometimes contradict family desires or interests.  One young woman rejects the arranged marriage her village-bound parents try to make for her.  But the tension between individual desire and family connection does not always produce and unproblematic personal liberation.  One of my favorite stories was that of Miranda Hong, a marketing executive, who, as the website describes, tries to "…to juggle home and work, the demands of her husband and her parents, and still find a place for herself."  It has a very American resonance.

      The film makes clear that the uncertainty and ethical fluidity of this period of rapid change in China have led many people to seek out new sources of moral guidance.   One fellow became a Christian.  Although it was not explicitly discussed in the documentary itself (or not, at least in the hour and a half that I saw), the resurgence of Confucianism and Taoism and other strands of traditional Chinese thought and culture can be explained by that same search for answers to the large questions of life.   The re-imagination of tradition is discussed in the "roundtable with China watchers" on the website the accompanies the film.  Here are a couple of excerpts:

Perry Link:

[The biggest issue facing the country now] is the problem of what ethical and social values to believe in. It is
deep in Chinese culture — in fact, it is coded into the very grammar
of daily-life Chinese language — that one should "be a person"
properly. But what exactly does that mean?

In "traditional Confucianism," the basic duties — of being a good
father, a good son, a good ruler, subject, husband, wife, friend, etc.
— were pretty well known. That doesn't mean that everybody always
behaved well, of course, but at least everybody knew the standards,
could use the values as their own moral compasses and could count on
the fact that other people also knew the standards, so that public
criticism of someone else's misbehavior could rest on a common basis.

Modern Chinese revolutions aimed to "knock down Confucius and sons,"
and, after some decades of confusion, in the 1950s socialist values
truly did take hold as new answers to the question of how to "be a good
person." But the disasters of late Maoism — the Great Leap famine and
the Cultural Revolution — turned people cynical about socialism, and
the devil-take-the-hindmost moneymaking of the post-Mao years has made
even the language of socialism utterly irrelevant to daily life.

Maureen Fan:

Of course, old values still apply — going home for Chinese New Year
and getting married to please your parents, for example. But the
importance of these pulls is shrinking. A former researcher says
society is now a fast-food culture: Many people are impatient, and if
old values and traditions don't immediately pay off for them somehow,
they will lose interest in that, too.

Still, many young people seem, in the end, loath to offend their
parents; for example, the many cases of gay sons or daughters entering
into marriages of convenience to keep up appearances or give their parents a grandchild. Confucianism is making a comeback
[in] schools, best-selling books and TV programs as people recognize
the fragility of old-fashioned values, and yet many Chinese have no
idea what Confucianism really is, reducing it in some cases to just a
few of its tenets such as filial piety or loyalty.

     The question we are left with, then, and one that I have no easy answer to, is: what will contemporary Confucianism and Taoism therefore be in present-day China?  They cannot be what they were traditionally.  Chinese society and culture have changed too much for that.  It would seem that if they are to be relevant and meaningful in today's China they each have to be accommodated to the more individualized and personalized contemporary culture.  Otherwise the young and the restless will look elsewhere for meaning.