Shanghai Baby : Negotiating Youth Self-Identity in Urban China

Shanghai Baby has been dismissed as another example of the grunge and shock literature genre emerging from modern Chinese writers. Detractors have described it as 'decadent', 'debauched' and 'pornographic' with the author labelled as a 'slave to Western culture'. However, a closer examination of Zhou Wei Hui's controversial semi-autobiography reveals an adroit social commentary on youth's ongoing negotiation of self-identity in China's complex and rapidly changing social structure. Using the sexual licence found in Western and European literature, Wei's work confronts traditional views on sex, women, family, and youth development. As a result of claims by Wei to speak for the new generation, the book was banned in China, with authorities burning 40,000 copies and instructing the State-run media to never mention the author or the book again because of its sexually charged content. Shanghai Baby highlights a peculiar form of impotence associated with a 'one country two systems' policy with youth willingness to push the parameters of 'acceptable' behaviour and the accompanying guilt (and retribution) when they do. This type of duality affects youth the most because of their willingness to embrace functional individualistic values, which provide them with the basic survival skills in a materialistic world, and their underlying collectivist values, which defines how they should act. As a result, youth have no clear model to follow with the Government encouraging them to be individualistic in some aspects (entrepreneurial and competitive) but not others (self-expression and empowerment). Wei's book is a metaphor for this struggle, highlighting how Chinese youth live their lives somewhere in between, precariously at times and brashly at others, feeling their way towards a functional coexistence of individualistic and collectivist value systems.