China's '08 generation finds a voice in tumultuous times

By Chris Buckley

BEIJING (Reuters) - By the time 2008 ends, Wang Junbo joked during a sweltering afternoon in China's earthquake zone, he and other young Chinese will have seen enough suffering, conflict and drama to retire early and write their memoirs.

"Maybe they'll call us the Olympics generation. Probably we should be the Wenchuan generation," he said, referring to the epicenter of the devastating quake in southwest China's Sichuan province, where he and thousands of others volunteered to help.

Wang's belief that this year's cascade of crises, especially the quake, has been an initiation rite for Chinese born after 1980 is widely shared. And it could leave a deep impression on a nation where the ruling Communist Party has warily faced its youth raised on global capitalism, Internet and text messaging.

"For us, it's been a chance to show we're not just kids who grew up pampered and useless," said Wang, a slight 19-year-old, who took time off from a university course in English to work in a temporary tent hospital for quake refugees in Mianzhu, Sichuan.

Since January, China has endured a paralyzing ice storm, anti-Western protests over Tibet that disrupted the Olympic torch relay and the calamitous quake on May 12. And all this before China hosts its first Olympic Games in Beijing in August.

At another time, shocks like these may have fed mass discontent, possibly fanned by university students who have often led the way in challenging government in modern China.

But far from shaking political stability, this year's tumult has so far stirred a surge of patriotism likely to help the Party, especially among a young generation with dim, textbook-fed impressions of Mao, Marx and the nation's much poorer past.

"I think these experiences are going to have a shaping role for this next generation," said Fang Ning, a political scientist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences who has studied youth nationalism and also advised top government leaders.

"It's been like a baptism for them. It won't completely transform their worldview, but it has helped crystallize a kind of collective mentality ... A new patriotism is certainly an important element of that."

FROM PROTEST TO PATRIOTISM

Close to 19 years after Chinese soldiers shot anti-government protesters near Beijing's Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, killing hundreds, a dramatically different mood dominated the square last month.

After the nation paused for three somber minutes on May 19 to mourn those killed in the earthquake a week earlier, thousands of students and citizens on the Square -- most too young to even vaguely recall 1989 -- erupted into passionate patriotic chants.

They marched with red flags across the vast square, shouted "Go China Go", roared out the national anthem.

That fervent patriotism, many students said, was the shared thread between their response to the quake and their earlier protests against Western media, companies and governments accused of supporting Tibetan independence.

In a survey of 2,648 residents by the China Society of Economic Reform in late May, 92.4 percent said their image of the government had improved after the quake and 98 percent said the experience had strengthened "national cohesion."