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...prominent these changes is a new kind of individualism valued by China's millennial youth. A key indicator of young Chinese attachment to this new individualism is the pervasive use of a new slang term associated with it, ku. Ku is the Chinese version of the American slang term "cool," and like cool, its emergence as a pervasive youth slang term is the verbal icon of a youth rebellion that promises to transform some of the older generation's most enduring cultural values. (China, youth, slang, culture change)
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It is all but impossible to discuss China today without acknowledging the significance of its increasingly rapid pace of change. Change is evident in economic development, especially in major urban centers like Shanghai and Beijing, and in the new official attitude toward private enterprise that is, to say the least, supportive. These overt trappings of change are part of a global process that has made marketing by major corporations a force whose power and immediacy may exceed those of the various religious or political philosophies the world has seen so far. Corresponding to this economically driven change are other transformations that are particularly apparent in the educated youth of China's millennial generation (Hooper 1991; Marr and Rosen 1998). Of course young Chinese respond to the forces of globalization in a variety of ways, many of which are mutually contradictory. Some may pointedly speak out against commercial forces while others readily accept them or embrace the commodities that are their agents in the popular media of films, music, television, and the Internet.
The millennials are the children of the Cultural Revolution generation. Largely because of globalization, their viewpoints and attitudes are profoundly different from those of their parents. A central feature of these attitudes is a kind of individualism that stands emphatically opposed to the collectivist spirit promoted during the Cultural Revolution, an individualism that is influenced by Western pop culture and is linked to the new Chinese slang term "ku," derived from the English slang term "cool." The ku of China's millennials is not a carbon copy of Western styles. There are different ways to be ku in contemporary China, but all reflect Western kinds of modernity and individualism.
The adoption of the word ku as a basic slang term symbolizing the values of a current generation of Chinese youth is similar to what occurred in the U.S. twice during the twentieth century, first in the 1920s with the term "swell," and again in the 1960s when swell was replaced by "cool" (Moore 2004). In each case a fundamental transformation in values, driven by adolescents and young adults, was accompanied by the emergence and widespread acceptance of a new slang term of approval. China today is experiencing a similar transformation in values among its youth. The acceptance of new values by young people in the face of resistance by their elders is a pattern commonly found in modern societies where popular culture flourishes via mass media. It is also common for the younger generation to emphasize its association with their new values via a pervasively used slang term.
In the case of ku, the newly adopted term is revealing in that it comes from a basic slang lexeme originating in Western popular culture, but is semantically linked to features not associated with the meaning of the Western term. In fact, the semantic modification of this slang term highlights what is most prominent in the way young Chinese identify themselves as distinct from their forebears.
Ku is written with a classical Chinese character (also pronounced ku) whose original meaning was "cruel." This written character is now more commonly employed to represent the new slang term in current popular culture contexts rather than the classical word ku. Most users of the word ku in the late 1990s reported being exposed to it mainly via Internet connections or through exposure to western popular culture, sometimes via Hong Kong Chinese mediators. Most respondents view the term as being derived from the American slang "cool," and when a young Chinese is asked about the meaning of ku, she will often simply say, "It means cool."
The issue of identity has drawn increasing attention in social science research in recent decades, and a number of cultural icons and complexes have been highlighted as markers of identity, including religion, food, sexuality, genealogy, and, of course, language (Barth 1969; Levy 1973; Anderson 1988; Lindholm 2001; Watson and Caldwell 2005). However, the use of a slang term as a generational identifier is different from the more general function of a dialect or other linguistic register as a key bearer of identity. This is partly because of the affective element inherent in slang. Slang lexemes function differently from most standard words and phrases in that they are part of what Biber (1988) refers to as relatively "involved" rather than "informational" speech. The former kind of speech is most typical of conversation and personal letters and not typical of the more "informational" registers such as scientific prose or official documents. What Biber labels as "involved" is one's self as an evaluating and emotional entity. Slang, as a speech form that strongly implies a measure of emotional or evaluative attitude, serves as a marker for those wishing to signal identity within a social milieu, particularly one associated with a distinct value complex. Basic slang emerges when members of a rising generation wish to signal their commitment to a set of values and attitudes that are clearly different from those of their parents' generation. For China's millennial youth, the value in question is a positive disposition toward a new kind of individualism represented by ku.
DATA
An interest in the slang term ku and individualistic values among young Chinese stems from a study of the word cool and its associated values in American youth culture (Moore 1993, 1997, 1998). Most of the material for the current study was collected during visits to China in 1993-4, 1998, 2000, 2002, and 2005. Some of these visits were from six to eight weeks, but my stay in 1993-4 as a visiting faculty member at Qingdao University lasted about a year. During the shorter visits I was at Beijing Foreign Studies University (known as Beiwai for short) and the Central Nationalities' University in Beijing (also known as Minzu Daxue). I also made several trips to the campuses of Beijing University, Tsinghua University, People's University, and Beijing Normal University (all in Beijing), and Luoyang Teachers' College in Luoyang, to meet students and faculty members.
The data for this study come from questionnaires on youth culture distributed to classes on some of these campuses, spending time with students, talking with them, and...
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