Brief Introduction to the Trends of
Contemporary Youth and Juvenile Studies in China
by Jin Zhikun (Professor, Institute of
Youth and Juvenile Studies, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences
) and Yang Xiong (Director& Professor, Institute of Youth and
Juvenile Studies, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences)
The study of Chinese youth and
juveniles emerged in the 1980’s as a modern discipline. The “cultural
revolution” between 1966 and 1976 brought great changes to the whole
society, making the problems experienced by youth and juveniles more
salient. After the Cultural Revolution, the whole society showed concern
for the problems experienced by youth and juveniles, so relevant studies
and institutions were undertaken quickly. Since 1980, the Social Sciences
research departments and the Communist Youth League system in China
founded in succession more than 20 institutions engaged in studying youth
and juveniles, including: the Communist Youth League system taking the
Chinese Centre of the Study of Youth and Juveniles as its core; and the
Social Sciences Academy system taking central and local institutes of the
study of youth and juveniles, including the Institute of Youth and
Juvenile Studies of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and the
Institute of Youth and Juvenile Studies of the Shanghai Academy of Social
Sciences, as its representatives. From these efforts, a number of academic
periodicals are now published, such as the Youth Study (edited by
the Section of the Study of Youth and Juveniles, Sociology Institute,
Chinese Academy of Social Sciences), Contemporary Youth Study (edited
by the Institute of the Study of Youth and Juveniles, Shanghai Academy of
Social Sciences), Chinese Youth Study (edited by the Chinese Centre
of the Study of Youth and Juveniles) and the Southern Youth Study (edited
by the Guangdong Institute of the Study of Youth and Juveniles).
The study of contemporary youth
and juveniles in China attaches importance to application and
countermeasure topics. With the end of the Cultural Revolution, the
research focused on youth employment problems, youth marriage, youth
values, youth social ideas, youth and juvenile delinquency, and the
problem of moral education in youth and juvenile. Researchers developed a
series of countermeasure studies in these areas. Entering the 1990’s, due
to the great changes in the Chinese society, the whole society shifted
from planned economy system to market economy system, from traditional
society to modern society. Accordingly, the problems in the study of youth
and juveniles got more holistic and deeper. The research orientation not
only started from real issues, but paid greater attention to the
macroscopic and integrated development of the Chinese society, studying
youth and juveniles from how the youth and juveniles meet the demand of
social development from the angle of overall human development. The
problems the study of youth and juveniles dealt with in the past twenty
years include both the problems specific to different ages in the whole
course of the emergence and development of youth groups and the problems
of the youth groups with different identities. At present, the foci of the
study of Chinese youth and juveniles are the problems of the development
of youth and juveniles, in the modernization process, such as the study of
raising the quality of youth and juveniles, tapping human resources among
youth and juveniles, and so on.
Moreover, the study of youth
culture and youth trends of thought has special significance. China’s
reforms and open policy create conditions for the exchange between
Oriental and Western cultures, and also poses the question of how to
absorb the advanced ideological, cultural and scientific modes of thinking
in the world and carry forward the splendid traditions of national,
culture, and the question of how to produce China’s own new and advanced
cultural and rational modes of thinking. In addition, the sphere of
research interests includes various new real issues in the society, such
as the problem of the disadvantage groups of youth and juveniles spawned
by imbalanced social development. The applicability such researches
manifest in precisely the major trait of the study of contemporary Chinese
youth and juveniles. Targeted on the salient problems of youth and
juveniles, scholars analyze, study and explore their causes and evaluate
their development trend and practical significance, this provides the
governmental departments concerned with references for making relevant
youth and juvenile policy, and promote actively the development of youth
and juvenile work in China.
But as the study of Youth and
juvenile started later than in other parts of the world, a lot of work in
disciplinary construction and topic application is left to be done. To
meet the need of teaching , the academics compiled in the 1990’s a batch
of textbooks such
theoretical writings as Youth studies, Modern Youth Studies,
Youth Sociology, and Youth Psychology. But these writings,
as a whole, make merely a periodic disentanglement, far from being ideal
when judged for theoretical profoundness. And, the specialties and courses
offered in institutions of higher learning are rather limited. Obviously,
how to further open up original theories in the study of youth and
juvenile and probe into the basic theories in the study of youth and
juvenile on the basis of plenty applied studies is still a research task
requiring the further effort of scholars studying Chinese youth. Directed
against such a situation, many scholars suggest that the study of youth
and juveniles should pay attention to both the study of current
countermeasures and the opening up of middle and long-term basic theories;
and carry out single-disciplinary study of special topics and creative
study of inter-disciplinary and comprehensive major topics, so as to meet
the need of disciplinary development.
In regard to the research method,
the study of youth and juveniles, as a new discipline, adopts not only the
traditional empirical study which applies many sociological investigatory
patterns, but also the research methods specific to other disciplines such
as psychology, education, ethics, jurisprudence, cultural anthropology and
cerebral science, thereby enriching the results of the overall study of
youth and juvenile.
Since the accession the Youth
Sociology Research Committee of the International Sociology Association in
1992, China has enhanced international exchange in youth study and
international comparative study, and since 1993, held six international
academic seminars successively in Shanghai and other cities. This is
conducive to the absorption of the advanced experiences of other countries
so as to grasp better the traits of the study of the native youth and
develop the youth study with national characteristics.