Word: young
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Ironically, many of these young men and women were originally dispatched to rural communes because there were not enough jobs for them in the cities. But last year, encouraged by the new liberalization policies of senior Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping, venturesome youths began drifting back to the cities. In an attempt to stem the tide, the Shanghai government announced that no youths working on its 35 state farms would be allowed to return home for three more years. Dozens of students on two such state farms in Anhui province reportedly committed suicide in despair. Meanwhile, others have descended on China...
...many young people, the day usually starts with a leisurely coffee at the Dong Hai (Eastern Sea) restaurant close to the Bund, Shanghai's main waterfront road. Others start with exercises on parallel bars in the People's Park. By midday boredom sets in. The unemployed pace the banks of the Huangpu (Whangpoo) River or just wander about aimlessly. There is a lot of window-shopping: by men at the new Jinxing television store on Nanjing Avenue, by women at the First Department Store's display of pleated skirts. In neither location are the displayed goods...
...only real diversion is provided by Shanghai's 65 movie theaters, most of which open at 6:30 a.m. City authorities have allowed that unusually early opening time to draw some of the jobless young people off the streets. The city's current favorite movie star is Charlie Chaplin. When Limelight opened in June, it was to S.R.O. crowds. The film appeared only because Shanghai's Chaplin fans reluctantly allowed Modern Times to close after a six-month run. Another top attraction is Awara, an Indian melodrama about a disaffected youth who becomes a vagabond after being...
Shanghai is losing the battle to induce its discontented young people to return to $24-a-month stints in remote regions and is allowing them to apply for local jobs. So is Peking, which has reduced its unemployment by placing youths in appliance repair centers and handicraft workshops. Last month an editorial in the People's Daily urged party leaders to make even more of an effort to create jobs for unemployed youths. In Nanjing, 600 otherwise unemployable young people have been given jobs as hairdressers and bathhouse attendants. Shanghai last month tried to provide make-work for several...
Sympathy for China's unemployed young people is not universal. The Sichuan (Szechuan) Communist Youth League recently complained that "some young people lack great and far-reaching revolutionary ideas, and some even pursue the decadent way of life of the bourgeoisie." Shu Xun, an English teacher at the Xiang Ming Middle School, worries about the materialism of many students, whose main concern is "getting an automobile or a color TV." Others have taken a revolutionary step further and even dared criticize the regime itself. "I think conditions must be far better in the Soviet Union than they are here...