Children of the reform and opening-up: China’s new generation and new era of development

Abstract

China’s new generation, born during the 1980s and 1990s, is a social cohort that has grown up in the era of reform and opening-up. They are simultaneously influenced by and play a critical role in a series of significant historical events in the aftermath of the reform and opening-up. The life course of this generation is intertwined with significant social changes, such as fast economic growth, the one-child policy, education expansion, the rise of the Internet, marketization, industrialization, urbanization, and globalization. These changes greatly affect their living circumstances and opportunities, shaping the generational characteristics while widening the intergenerational gap between them and the previous generations. At the same time, however, China’s new generation is unable to break the constraints of the social structure. The shared generational identity fails to eliminate the socioeconomic disparities within the generation. In contrast, marketization has strengthened the Chinese class structure through intergenerational transmission. In China’s new era of development, promoting equal opportunities and narrowing socioeconomic inequality among the new generation now proves to be a new challenge.