Many young Chinese feel they have been denied the dream of globalisation

The club was hard to find and it involved walking through a mall after all the shops were closed, into a tower block and up a few floors in a lift. Inside it was dark but unexpectedly spacious, with tables arranged in concentric circles around a dance floor that looked up into a broad, black, tubular dome at least 20m tall.

Groups clustered around tables at the edge of the dance floor, sharing bottles of spirits that stood next to ice buckets and plates of snacks. Onstage a succession of drag queens in silver knee-high boots lip-synced their way through the hits of Taylor Swift, while images of the singer appeared on a giant screen behind them.

The lip-syncing was hit and miss but the crowd was word-perfect as they roared out the lyrics of each song, all of which everyone seemed to know. When the Swift tribute was over and the DJ played Chinese and Korean pop songs, the audience sang along with them too and, once again, they knew all the words.

Most of those in the club were moderately affluent members of China’s Generation Z who skip easily across cultures, viewing their own as about equal to the others. They are better educated and more financially secure than their parents’ generation, but many fear that their prospects are narrower.

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“It feels like a very mild version of the Cultural Revolution where our lives have been put on hold. The Cultural Revolution lasted for 10 years. In 10 years it will be too late for us. Our dream will never happen,” one young man told me.

A graduate from one of China’s elite universities, he went to an Ivy League college in the United States for graduate studies before coming home last year. Unlike many graduates in China, he had no difficulty finding a job but when he started work in a state-owned enterprise he found it stultifying.

Once or sometimes twice a week staff had to participate in study sessions on Xi Jinping Thought, during which most spent the whole time scrolling through their phones. A questionnaire after one of the sessions asked if there was a problem of formalism in the workplace and they answered unanimously that there was not.

He has now moved on to another job which he enjoys more but he still feels a sense of disappointment and disillusionment. I asked him to describe the dream he thought was being denied to his generation.

“For me I think it was globalisation, the idea that I could move between here and the US and Europe and feel integrated everywhere. That seems hopeless now,” he said.

It is not only China that has turned inward in recent years, and in the US a new spirit of McCarthyism has created a cold climate for Chinese immigrants, including the most highly educated. Chinese students and academics have been targeted, prosecuted and harassed by US federal agencies, sometimes losing their careers before being exonerated.

Between 2018 and 2022 the US justice department’s China Initiative targeted academics who failed to disclose ties with China, including grants, sabbaticals and honorary appointments. Although only a few of those targeted were prosecuted for espionage-related offences, hundreds of academics were smeared as Chinese spies and many lost their jobs as a result of internal investigations prompted by the initiative.

More recently Chinese students and researchers at US universities with valid visas have been detained at airports by immigration officials, questioned and deported. Some report that their computers and phones were taken and searched while they were interrogated about whether their parents had any links to the Chinese Communist Party, an organisation with more than 90 million members.

Europe offers a less hostile environment but anti-China sentiment is rising there too as some politicians, think tanks and academics adopt the US playbook, viewing relations with Beijing solely through the lens of national security or as a contest between democracy and authoritarianism. Such attitudes affirm the worldview of some Chinese nationalists and chauvinists but it leaves gifted cosmopolitans like the young man I spoke to feeling trapped.

“Things are going nowhere here but I don’t want to go back to the US now. It’s like there’s no way out,” he said.