TED 演讲 | 杨澜 The generation that's remaking China（年青一代塑造中国）
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The night before I was heading for Scotland, I was invited to host the
final of "China's Got Talent" show in Shanghai with the 80,000 live audience in
the stadium. Guess who was the performing guest? Susan Boyle. And I told her,
"I'm going to Scotland the next day." She sang beautifully, and she even managed
to say a few words in Chinese. [Chinese:送你葱] So it's not like "hello" or "thank
you," that ordinary stuff. It means "green onion for free." Why did she say
that? Because it was a line from our Chinese parallel Susan Boyle -- a 50-some
year-old woman, a vegetable vendor in Shanghai, who loves singing Western opera,
but she didn't understand any English or French or Italian, so she managed to
fill in the lyrics with vegetable names in Chinese. (Laughter) And the last
sentence of Nessun Dorma that she was singing in the stadium was "green onion
for free." So [as] Susan Boyle was saying that, 80,000 live audience sang
together. That was hilarious.
So I guess both Susan Boyle and this vegetable
vendor in Shanghai belonged to otherness. They were the least expected to be
successful in the business called entertainment, yet their courage and talent
brought them through. And a show and a platform gave them the stage to realize
their dreams. Well, being different is not that difficult. We are all different
from different perspectives. But I think being different is good, because you
present a different point of view. You may have the chance to make a
difference.
My generation has been very fortunate to witness and participate
in the historic transformation of China that has made so many changes in the
past 20, 30 years. I remember that in the year of 1990, when I was graduating
from college, I was applying for a job in the sales department of the first
five-star hotel in Beijing, Great Wall Sheraton -- it's still there. So after
being interrogated by this Japanese manager for a half an hour, he finally said,
"So, Miss Yang, do you have any questions to ask me?" I summoned my courage and
poise and said, "Yes, but could you let me know, what actually do you sell?" I
didn't have a clue what a sales department was about in a five-star hotel. That
was the first day I set my foot in a five-star hotel.
Around the same time, I
was going through an audition -- the first ever open audition by national
television in China -- with another thousand college girls. The producer told us
they were looking for some sweet, innocent and beautiful fresh face. So when it
was my turn, I stood up and said, "Why [do] women's personalities on television
always have to be beautiful, sweet, innocent and, you know, supportive? Why
can't they have their own ideas and their own voice?" I thought I kind of
offended them. But actually, they were impressed by my words. And so I was in
the second round of competition, and then the third and the fourth. After seven
rounds of competition, I was the last one to survive it. So I was on a national
television prime-time show. And believe it or not, that was the first show on
Chinese television that allowed its hosts to speak out of their own minds
without reading an approved script. (Applause) And my weekly audience at that
time was between 200 to 300 million people.
Well after a few years, I decided
to go to the U.S. and Columbia University to pursue my postgraduate studies, and
then started my own media company, which was unthought of during the years that
I started my career. So we do a lot of things. I've interviewed more than a
thousand people in the past. And sometimes I have young people approaching me
say, "Lan, you changed my life," and I feel proud of that. But then we are also
so fortunate to witness the transformation of the whole country. I was in
Beijing's bidding for the Olympic Games. I was representing the Shanghai Expo. I
saw China embracing the world and vice versa. But then sometimes I'm thinking,
what are today's young generation up to? How are they different, and what are
the differences they are going to make to shape the future of China, or at
large, the world?
So today I want to talk about young people through the
platform of social media. First of all, who are they? [What] do they look like?
Well this is a girl called Guo Meimei -- 20 years old, beautiful. She showed off
her expensive bags, clothes and car on her microblog, which is the Chinese
version of Twitter. And she claimed to be the general manager of Red Cross at
the Chamber of Commerce. She didn't realize that she stepped on a sensitive
nerve and aroused national questioning, almost a turmoil, against the
credibility of Red Cross. The controversy was so heated that the Red Cross had
to open a press conference to clarify it, and the investigation is going
on.
So far, as of today, we know that she herself made up that title --
probably because she feels proud to be associated with charity. All those
expensive items were given to her as gifts by her boyfriend, who used to be a
board member in a subdivision of Red Cross at Chamber of Commerce. It's very
complicated to explain. But anyway, the public still doesn't buy it. It is still
boiling. It shows us a general mistrust of government or government-backed
institutions, which lacked transparency in the past. And also it showed us the
power and the impact of social media as microblog.
Microblog boomed in the
year of 2010, with visitors doubled and time spent on it tripled. Sina.com, a
major news portal, alone has more than 140 million microbloggers. On Tencent,
200 million. The most popular blogger -- it's not me -- it's a movie star, and
she has more than 9.5 million followers, or fans. About 80 percent of those
microbloggers are young people, under 30 years old. And because, as you know,
the traditional media is still heavily controlled by the government, social
media offers an opening to let the steam out a little bit. But because you don't
have many other openings, the heat coming out of this opening is sometimes very
strong, active and even violent.
So through microblogging, we are able to
understand Chinese youth even better. So how are they different? First of all,
most of them were born in the 80s and 90s, under the one-child policy. And
because of selected abortion by families who favored boys to girls, now we have
ended up with 30 million more young men than women. That could pose a potential
danger to the society, but who knows; we're in a globalized world, so they can
look for girlfriends from other countries. Most of them have fairly good
education. The illiteracy rate in China among this generation is under one
percent. In cities, 80 percent of kids go to college. But they are facing an
aging China with a population above 65 years old coming up with seven-point-some
percent this year, and about to be 15 percent by the year of 2030. And you know
we have the tradition that younger generations support the elders financially,
and taking care of them when they're sick. So it means young couples will have
to support four parents who have a life expectancy of 73 years old.
So making
a living is not that easy for young people. College graduates are not in short
supply. In urban areas, college graduates find the starting salary is about 400
U.S. dollars a month, while the average rent is above $500. So what do they do?
They have to share space -- squeezed in very limited space to save money -- and
they call themselves "tribe of ants." And for those who are ready to get married
and buy their apartment, they figured out they have to work for 30 to 40 years
to afford their first apartment. That ratio in America would only cost a couple
five years to earn, but in China it's 30 to 40 years with the skyrocketing real
estate price.
Among the 200 million migrant workers, 60 percent of them are
young people. They find themselves sort of sandwiched between the urban areas
and the rural areas. Most of them don't want to go back to the countryside, but
they don't have the sense of belonging. They work for longer hours with less
income, less social welfare. And they're more vulnerable to job losses, subject
to inflation, tightening loans from banks, appreciation of the renminbi, or
decline of demand from Europe or America for the products they produce. Last
year, though, an appalling incident in a southern OEM manufacturing compound in
China: 13 young workers in their late teens and early 20s committed suicide,
just one by one like causing a contagious disease. But they died because of all
different personal reasons. But this whole incident aroused a huge outcry from
society about the isolation, both physical and mental, of these migrant
workers.
For those who do return back to the countryside, they find
themselves very welcome locally, because with the knowledge, skills and networks
they have learned in the cities, with the assistance of the Internet, they're
able to create more jobs, upgrade local agriculture and create new business in
the less developed market. So for the past few years, the coastal areas, they
found themselves in a shortage of labor.
These diagrams show a more general
social background. The first one is the Engels coefficient, which explains that
the cost of daily necessities has dropped its percentage all through the past
decade, in terms of family income, to about 37-some percent. But then in the
last two years, it goes up again to 39 percent, indicating a rising living cost.
The Gini coefficient has already passed the dangerous line of 0.4. Now it's 0.5
-- even worse than that in America -- showing us the income inequality. And so
you see this whole society getting frustrated about losing some of its mobility.
And also, the bitterness and even resentment towards the rich and the powerful
is quite widespread. So any accusations of corruption or backdoor dealings
between authorities or business would arouse a social outcry or even
unrest.
So through some of the hottest topics on microblogging, we can see
what young people care most about. Social justice and government accountability
runs the first in what they demand. For the past decade or so, a massive
urbanization and development have let us witness a lot of reports on the forced
demolition of private property. And it has aroused huge anger and frustration
among our young generation. Sometimes people get killed, and sometimes people
set themselves on fire to protest. So when these incidents are reported more and
more frequently on the Internet, people cry for the government to take actions
to stop this.
So the good news is that earlier this year, the state council
passed a new regulation on house requisition and demolition and passed the right
to order forced demolition from local governments to the court. Similarly, many
other issues concerning public safety is a hot topic on the Internet. We heard
about polluted air, polluted water, poisoned food. And guess what, we have faked
beef. They have sorts of ingredients that you brush on a piece of chicken or
fish, and it turns it to look like beef. And then lately, people are very
concerned about cooking oil, because thousands of people have been found
[refining] cooking oil from restaurant slop. So all these things have aroused a
huge outcry from the Internet. And fortunately, we have seen the government
responding more timely and also more frequently to the public
concerns.
While young people seem to be very sure about their participation
in public policy-making, but sometimes they're a little bit lost in terms of
what they want for their personal life. China is soon to pass the U.S. as the
number one market for luxury brands -- that's not including the Chinese
expenditures in Europe and elsewhere. But you know what, half of those consumers
are earning a salary below 2,000 U.S. dollars. They're not rich at all. They're
taking those bags and clothes as a sense of identity and social status. And this
is a girl explicitly saying on a TV dating show that she would rather cry in a
BMW than smile on a bicycle. But of course, we do have young people who would
still prefer to smile, whether in a BMW or [on] a bicycle.
So in the next
picture, you see a very popular phenomenon called "naked" wedding, or "naked"
marriage. It does not mean they will wear nothing in the wedding, but it shows
that these young couples are ready to get married without a house, without a
car, without a diamond ring and without a wedding banquet, to show their
commitment to true love. And also, people are doing good through social media.
And the first picture showed us that a truck caging 500 homeless and kidnapped
dogs for food processing was spotted and stopped on the highway with the whole
country watching through microblogging. People were donating money, dog food and
offering volunteer work to stop that truck. And after hours of negotiation, 500
dogs were rescued. And here also people are helping to find missing children. A
father posted his son's picture onto the Internet. After thousands of [unclear],
the child was found, and we witnessed the reunion of the family through
microblogging.
So happiness is the most popular word we have heard through
the past two years. Happiness is not only related to personal experiences and
personal values, but also, it's about the environment. People are thinking about
the following questions: Are we going to sacrifice our environment further to
produce higher GDP? How are we going to perform our social and political reform
to keep pace with economic growth, to keep sustainability and stability? And
also, how capable is the system of self-correctness to keep more people content
with all sorts of friction going on at the same time? I guess these are the
questions people are going to answer. And our younger generation are going to
transform this country while at the same time being transformed
themselves.
Thank you very much. (Applause)
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