Rural youth and youth culture in north China

This article describes how economic reforms have transformed the local world of village life in North China, specifically the emergence of a rural "youth culture" that reflects urban values and styles. This culture has both challenged and enriched rural China's tradition and its more recent communal structure, a change that reshapes the relations amongst family members of different age cohorts as well as between peasants and cadres, it is argued that this transformation in the Chinese countryside holds opportunities to improve living conditions and unmake the constraints of tradition and the modern nation-state on life chances and everyday experience. The sheer number of rural youth in China suggests that the future impact of this transformation on social realities could be enormous.