Thought for the day

In China, age differences make a huge difference. "Of course," I thought when I first came, "It's a cultural thing. Respect your elders and all that. Traditional!" But talking with the people in the office (who are mainly late 20s and early 30s) here I can see how much this is the product of recent history. Simply put, the difference between the exposure and opportunities that China presented to a 27-year-old and a 30-year-old growing up are vast--and this is probably increasingly true with my generation here as China opens up its doors to the West. In Korea I saw a similar thing, though it manifested itself differently and more dramatically: a comparatively small youth population (especially in cities, it's increasingly expensive to have kids) whose parents all had many more siblings and were accustomed to large families, so that all of those resources and attention (and pressure! Your future IS the national exam) were lavished on just one or two kids compared to a previous generation's 7 or 8. In both China and Korea, on different time-scales, economic development has meant a hugely expanded world of opportunity for youth. Several things I've read suggest that Chinese are unconcerned with Western fixations like free media because, for the first time, everyone has good access to enough food. 'Human Rights' seem not to be the most fundamental rights, after all--but the free-speech-ful hobo begging for food in any major American city could tell you as much. And of course you have to factor in things like the One Child Policy and a rich and turbulent modern history that I am by-and-large ignorant of. The experiences, opportunities, and expectations for each subsequent generation (and even each year within generations) are vastly different from one another.