The generation that's remaking China

Yang Lan, a journalist and entrepreneur who's been called "the Oprah of China," offers insight into the next generation of young Chinese citizens -- urban, connected (via microblogs) and alert to injustice.

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:

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 resends in relay,

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)