Beyond ‘Rising Tides’ and ‘Lying Flat’: Emergent Cultural Practices Among Youth in Urban China

In their article, “Beyond ‘Rising Tides’ and ‘Lying Flat’: Emergent Cultural Practices Among Youth in Urban China”, Diego Gullotta and Lili Lin examine how Chinese youth are positioned within the dominant culture, how young people appropriate space in their emergent cultural practices, and how they negotiate meaning-making. The article first analyses the rising tides (houlang) video, sponsored jointly by the state and the private sector, and argues that it reduces youth to a homogenous subject inscribed into the discourse of “China’s rise” (zhongguo jueqi) via emotional mobilization. The “lying flat” phenomenon represents young people’s negative response to this mobilization, yet it still falls into the dichotomous discourse of “positive/negative energy”. Moving beyond this discourse, the article provides three cases of emergent cultural practices among urban middle-class youth to explore to what extent can these practices, characterized by knowledge and fluidity, exceed the logic of the state and the market.