He is sullen, brooding, 15 years old and now among China’s best selling authors. Tang Chao’s (唐朝) paperback, Give Me Back the Dream (把夢還給我), a dark tale of unrequited teenage love, conflict with parents and adolescent suicide, reached the top of the bestseller lists last week, a success confirming the coming of age of what has been dubbed the country’s “Generation Z.”
“I just tell the story of people I know,” Tang said in a telephone interview from his home in the central Chinese city of Chengdu. “We are the post-90s generation and society doesn’t understand us.”
Such sentiments might be the staple of sulky adolescents in the West, but they are new in China. If the country’s Generation X grew up in the aftermath of the devastating Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976, and Generation Y enjoyed the extraordinary economic growth of the 1980s and 1990s, “Generation Z” has a different teen spirit.
Books such as Give Me Back the Dream and the “adolescent anguish” series of Rao Xueman (饒雪曼) sell millions of copies. So do the novels of 24-year-old Guo Jingming (郭精明), whose melancholy young heroes seek an answer to their anguish by sitting alone on top of high buildings for hours pondering their plight or by plunging into a vortex of violence, alcohol and karaoke.
Alternative music with a darker, more nihilistic style than the saccharine pop that has dominated the Chinese market for a decade is also beginning to make inroads. More than anything, the real novelty is simply the idea that teenagers can be grumpy, hostile and apathetic.
“Our parents think we are like them, but we are not,” 18-year-old Ye Jiadi said while smoking a cigarette outside the D-22 club in the university area of Beijing.
“We just want to hang out. We don’t want to live like our fathers lived. We have our own way,” he said.
In a country where hundreds of millions still live below the poverty line, the “Z” phenomenon remains restricted to the comfortable and educated middle class of urban centers, but nevertheless many still see it as significant.
“The writers say what their readers — high-school students for the most part — want to say themselves,” said Zheng Tan, professor of literature at Fudan University in Shanghai.
“These are people who have grown up in a China that is becoming steadily wealthier, and as material conditions have improved they have become more concerned with private emotion,” Zheng said.
The work of the new writers is also less politically controversial.
“Their focus is very personal and they deal less with social, political or economic themes. So the government leaves them alone — and that suits everybody: publishers, authors and consumers alike,” Zheng said.
For Deng Jun, a child psychologist in Beijing, books such as Give Me Back the Dream portray the reality for millions of young people.
“Official government statistics speak of between 500 and 700 teenagers reported with depression in China, but these figures are very conservative,” she said. “The hotline I run received more than 2,500 calls in the last year from young people showing depressive tendencies.”
A further problem is China’s 30-year-old policy limiting parents to one child.
“This has created a generation of over-indulged children who have little ability to confront disappointment or hardship,” Deng said.
“There is also an enormous pressure on only children to succeed. They feel depressed, anguished and can easily become suicidal. They often have problems making friends,” she said.
In Tang’s book, one character kills himself by jumping from the top of his apartment block after a row with his ambitious parents, who have banned him from pursuing a love affair with a schoolmate for fear it could damage his exam results. Young fans of the author said he was describing something many of them felt.
“Our generation lacks confidence, and as we are often only children we are terrified of being alone or losing friends,” 17-year-old Wei Pengfei said, a schoolgirl in line to buy Tang’s book at a central Beijing bookshop.
A series of studies in recent years has revealed that Chinese teenagers are smoking and drinking more and having sex at a younger age. Another concern is Internet addiction. The government has set up a series of centers that use a mixture of military-style boot camp discipline and sympathy to treat teenagers who become dependent on the Internet, particularly on video games.
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