Generations apart? We sat down with Turkish and Chinese families to hear whether things really are that different between the generations when it comes to free speech

Index brought families together in China and Turkey to see if taboos or censorship had changed over three generations. Karoline Kan reports from China and Kaya Genç reports from Turkey. They chatted about Turkish freedom of speech in universities, and in China sex and relationships

A family dining on the Ma Cheo commune outside Shanghai, 1964; Women take a selfie in the Chinese city of Nanjing; Students in conversation at the University of Fine Arts, Istanbul, in 1973; Retired Turkish architect Doğan Tuna and his granddaughter Alexandra de Cramer

CREDIT: (top left) Rene Burri/Magnum Photos; (top right) Charles O. Cecil/Alamy; (bottom right) Ullstein Bild/Getty

Generation XXX

Karoline Kan listens to a Chinese grandfather and granddaughter discuss marriage and sex from past to present

WANG SHOUKUI WAS born in 1945, in a village near the northern Chinese port of Tianjin, the eldest of seven children in a peasant family. It was the year the war ended with Japan and four years before the Chinese Communist Party won the civil war and founded the People’s Republic of China.

Shoukui is a product of old and new China. He grew up with one “re-education” campaign after another – including the teaching of new ideas and customs on marriage and relationships, when the Communist Party made laws to ban forced marriage and announced that women should enjoy the same rights as men. He went to the best school in his hometown and became a lawyer. But he believed in “mendanghudui” – an old Chinese saying that suggests that the families of a couple should match each other in terms of socio-economic status – so he married a woman from a neighbouring village. The couple married two months after their first meeting. They moved to a nearby town and had two sons. She was illiterate, but she was a kind woman who did all the housework and took care of his parents and their children. The family was more important than love in marriage at that time, anyway. His wife died in 1994 from cancer, and Shoukui remarried the next year. He and his second wife are now living in Tianjin.

Wang Shuo is the daughter of Shoukui’s elder son. Born in 1995, Shuo belongs to the generation of the youngest millennials. Like most Chinese people her age, she is an only child. She grew up listening to K-pop and watching The Big Bang Theory. She’s never had a boyfriend and is open to remaining single and having no kids, which her parents and grandfather cannot understand. She is a graduate student, majoring in biology at a college in Tianjin. The topics of marriage and sex are not banned in China, but she and her friends face many obstacles in freely expressing themselves on these issues.

Q: What do you think has changed in terms of freedom of expression on issues of relationships, marriage and sex in China?

Shoukui: I am reluctant to say the changes are about “freedom”. I think the changes are more about social customs, because most of the topics that people of my generation didn’t talk [about] in public, but young people do today, were not banned by the government – just, culturally, people were not comfortable with them. For example, when we were young, couples never said “love” to each other. “Love” was not a word banned by the communists, [but] in that kind of society it would be awkward to say it. I still don’t understand why people say it in public today. If you love somebody, you prove it by actions. The younger generation make relationships and marriage look like such a big deal, talking about it all the time. They should be only a small part in your life. It is important, but you don’t need to share your feelings with others. But, sure, if you say the cultural, social changes bring more “freedoms” on talking about these, I agree.

Shuo: I think people are more open to talking about marriage and relationships today. Actually, my mother loves to talk with me about what kind of boyfriend or husband I should have in the future. I know in the past it was not common for unmarried women to discuss it – even with their close family members. Women were supposed to be ignorant about these kinds of things. However, now parents and teachers still don’t teach their kids about sex. I think what has improved is the public awareness on topics like sexual harassment and domestic violence. Those topics used to be considered as too private [to be] public topics. But now they are public concerns.

Q: What are the disadvantages women face in relationships and marriage? Is there enough space for women to speak out if their rights are violated?

Shoukui: Because I worked as a lawyer in a local court, I met many cases when women tried to seek justice but didn’t know anything about law, or they were afraid to face the consequences. Chinese men, even the uneducated, the poor, the ones who are in a less advanced position in many ways, enjoy much more than women with the same socio-economic background. Rural women my age dared not speak against their in-laws, and once they were married they no longer belonged to their own families. They moved away to an environment where they had no support network. Their husbands were their everything, so when they faced domestic violence they had nobody to help them. I think it has improved hugely now. Young women are more likely to go to court today than men. I think young women are more open-minded, like to learn, and are eager to protect their rights. Today, the court I used to work at receives more divorce cases proposed by wives than husbands.

Shuo: People keep saying young women of my generation enjoy as many rights as men, but it’s only on paper. Society still expects different things from women. The prejudice is always that women are less reasonable than men, so when they face problems in a relationship or marriage society trusts them less and thinks they are exaggerating and emotional. Although they could find help from the law, from lawyers, court, police, what would they face afterwards? And is society really helping? For example, maternity leave is basically only given to women, but is that benefiting women? Probably not, but if you complain people will tell you women and men are different. They say giving women maternity leave is helping women. The same group of people probably would say in other circumstances that companies should hire men rather than women, also because of the “natural differences between the two genders” and “women need to take maternity leave”. So, I don’t think women have enough space to speak out because we do not make the rules.

Q: What are the differences between your own opinions on marriage and relationships and those of other generations in your family?

Shoukui: To me, the core value of marriage and relationships should be responsibility more than love. I grew up with the PRC. The communism value was important in every aspect of society, including marriage. We very much valued contributing to society. Marrying and having children at the right time was also a part of contributing to the country and your family. The government wants young people to settle down, which would help maintain social stability, while having children to continue the bloodline is being responsible to the family. In our time, to get married, you had to get approval from your boss, let alone your parents. But at least I met my wife many times before we got married. She was introduced by a family relative. Our marriage was not arranged. It was different from the marriage of my parents, who were born in the 1920s. They got married as teenagers and their wedding day was the first day they met. I had never heard my parents complain about anything about marriage, although I know a lot was wrong. People their age didn’t know an alternative way of living. They never thought about divorce.

My son’s generation grew up watching a lot of Hong Kong and Taiwan films and TV shows, which were mostly about love and relationships. I didn’t like them, and many old-fashioned people thought that pop culture polluted the minds of the mainlanders. But, of course, my generation’s attitudes also changed as the culture and society changed. For example, I remarried in my late 40s when my wife died. I knew people were more tolerant to me than to my second wife, whose first husband also died. Men remarrying was always normal, but not for women, especially when they were no longer young. However, women of all ages today remarry and would get blessings from their families.

I know nothing about my two granddaughters’ lives, but I hope they will get married. Marriage and children give people the meaning of life, especially when they get old.

Shuo: I don’t know much about the love stories of my grandparents. I guess they are not really keen to talk about it anyway. In a Chinese family, people are shy about these topics. But I have heard a bit about my parents’ marriage. My father went to a matchmaker two dozen times and he had been picky until he met my mother. Families on both sides thought they were old enough to get married even though they were in their early 20s. They were not forced, but clearly pressured. I asked them why they didn’t fight back, and they said unless you wanted to split up with the one you dated, you would marry soon. It was in 1998. And in 1999, they had me. They fought a lot, but they were always pressured to stay together in the name of benefiting me. Also, they were afraid a different person wouldn’t make much difference.

I probably won’t have a stable boyfriend or marriage. My mother doesn’t treat that idea seriously. I just don’t see why not if I work and can support myself financially. The society is not friendly to unmarried women, but it will change.

Q: Have you paid any attention to LGBTQ issues and same-sex marriage?

Shoukui: What is LGBTQ? (An explanation follows.) These are just jokes from people who have too much time and nothing else to do. Why should abnormal topics take people’s time and attention? Allowing same-sex marriage would encourage more abnormal things in this country. These ideas are harmful ideas from foreign countries after the Reform and Opening Up in 1978. Freedom of speech should have boundaries. Black is never white.

Shuo: I have gay and lesbian classmates in the university. It’s still a sensitive topic. We wouldn’t say bad things in front of them but, also, we wouldn’t say in public we support same-sex marriage. I guess the Chinese campus environment is still quite conservative. I have never read anything in the classroom about homosexuality. I watched some good films, European and American, about gay love. You cannot find Chinese films or TV shows describing homosexual people as normal people. They would get censored quickly. The environment here is that homosexuality is wrong, and the schools and teachers don’t want to talk about it.

Examining Turkey’s School Days

In the second of our cross-generational interviews, a journalist and her architect grandfather explore the reduction of freedom in Turkish universities from the 1950s to today. Kaya Genç reports

DOĞAN TUNA, A retired Turkish architect and scholar, recalls the day Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, his country’s secularist founder, died in 1938. Aged seven, he wept with his classmates and travelled to Dolmabahce, the Istanbul palace where Ataturk took his last breath, to show his gratitude. “I went twice,” he said. “We were brought up as Ataturk’s followers.”

Tuna came of age during the 1950s, a decade that saw Turkey experiment with multi-party democracy in the wake of Ataturk’s modernising reforms. Tuna savoured Turkey’s cosmopolitan new atmosphere where radical ideas could be freely debated.

“Our professors called from Bonn and Cologne. We could discuss anything with them! Our schools hosted debating societies which contributed greatly to freedom of expression [during] the 1950s. We’d go to meeting halls to watch law and political science students debate political subjects. Those were broadcast live on the radio. That was a healthy medium for debate and dialogue. Students would vote to decide who won the argument. We believed that a student who stayed silent in a university meant nothing. Universities are about universalism; with silenced students who just complete their homework, what you actually have are vocational schools.”

Tuna is talking about his university years with Alexandra de Cramer, his 31-year-old granddaughter. They are sitting in the living room of Tuna’s house in the Aegean city of Izmir for an interview arranged by Index. Between 1992 and 1995, Tuna was the dean of a leading fine arts college in the city. His post allowed him to observe Turkey’s declining academic freedom first-hand.

While studying political science during the 2000s, de Cramer found herself in an atmosphere of declining academic freedom. “I graduated from high school in 2006 when Turkish universities were starting to resemble the vocational schools you’ve described,” she told her grandfather. “The system that provided those academic freedoms you cherished were, by then, over.”

De Cramer asks her grandfather about the factors behind the academic freedoms of the 1950s. “Firstly, there was no centralised control over universities,” Tuna said. “The freedom of expression before the military coup in 1960 was so strong! Universities self-administered. Secondly, young people felt much freer. Political freedoms animated us.” He recalls marching to Taksim Square with fellow students. “Teaching assistants marched alongside us. The police didn’t intervene. They were there to protect us.”

In the Turkey of de Cramer’s youth, the kind of political student march Tuna describes would have been unthinkable. Instead, over the past half-decade, she anxiously watched crackdown after crackdown on Turkish scholars. Only last year, about 700 academics, mostly outspoken critics of Turkey’s treatment of Armenians, Kurds and other political dissidents, were criminally charged, accused of supporting terror after they signed a petition calling for the resumption of a peace process.

De Cramer claims such authoritarian measures have created apathy among university students. “Turkey today doesn’t allow its students to be cultured. A recent survey found that the first thing my generation would sell in Turkey would be their citizenship! The youth have had enough of this country.”

Tuna contrasts this catastrophic state of affairs with the virtues of the “republican education system” he encountered half a century ago. “During my time, faculties were independent. Everything changed in 1982, with the foundation of the Council of Higher Education, which centralised all decision-making in Ankara.” De Cramer asks whose idea that was. “Well, that brings us to the 1980 coup,” he says, reminding her of the US support in that military takeover. “Thanks to those interventions, universities have become something else entirely.”

But the 2010s came with an interest among Turkish scholars and students in breaking long-held taboos on subjects including the Armenian genocide, LGBTQ rights, feminism and the Kurdish question. This allowed de Cramer to learn about these issues before she moved to Beirut to cover the Arab Spring in 2011 for Turkish newspaper Milliyet. She then settled in London, joining Monocle magazine.

De Cramer sees a correlation between a lack of academic freedom and young people’s unwillingness to continue living in Turkey. In a recent Arab Daily piece on Turkey’s “lost generation”, The Betrayal of Turkey’s Youth, she pondered what her country, with a median age of 30, offered its university students.

“In the last 15 years, the number of unemployed university graduates has increased tenfold. Currently, 26% of university graduates are unable to find a job.” Because of the clampdown on academic freedom, she noted, “it is little wonder that Turkey’s finest brains have sought opportunities elsewhere”.

As a retired educator, Tuna seems depressed about this state of affairs. To offer her a way out, he details the 1950s’ equalitarian workplace culture that de Cramer’s generation lacks. “We had high ethical standards; we saw little favouritism or nepotism. But after the coup in 1960, the Turkish military throttled this lenient atmosphere.”

He also identifies a geopolitical shift as one reason behind the current lack of academic freedoms. “For my entry exam at Istanbul’s prestigious Technical University, I wrote an essay on Viktor Kravchenko’s I Chose Freedom – a Ukrainian-born Soviet defector’s tale about oppression in his homeland. Turkey had close ties with Europe and the USA back then; my three-page essay won me a place at school.” In contrast, today Turkish universities are increasingly run by professors whose ideas are echoed by the government’s embrace of regimes such as those in Azerbaijan, China, Iran, Russia and Venezuela.

Tuna and de Cramer discuss unchanging attitudes against academic freedom between the 1950s and the 2010s, and the anti-intellectualism of Turkey’s leaders stands out. “Prime Minister [Adnan] Menderes made a grave mistake,” Tuna recalled, “when he mocked professors who criticised his rule by calling them ‘scholars in cloaks’ in the 1950s.” De Cramer shouts: “It is the same intellectual-bashing we have in the 2020s!”

She describes how students can no longer express themselves at school. “Of course they can’t. They don’t have the platforms we’ve had,” Tuna — said. “And the taboos appear to have increased,” his granddaughter interjects. Then she points to improvements: “I think taboos about female scholars partly disappeared for my generation. All girls my age go to college with aspirations for careers nowadays. I think that was different in your time.”

When Tuna says that he “wouldn’t like to grow up in today’s Turkey because there is no future here”, de Cramer lets out a little scream. “Granddad! What are people like me supposed to do, then?” Tuna considers the question for a moment. “Each has to find their own solution,” he murmured, refusing to strike a note of optimism. But then he drops the name of Greta Thunberg as a potential symbol of hope for Turkish students. He wishes Turkish academies would allow local Gretas to emerge and question the system as diligently as she does, and he sees a parallel between Sweden’s liberal education system and the Turkish education system of his youth.

“Nobody is outspoken like her these days,” he said. “Only Greta has the guts. If she was my granddaughter, I’d kiss her on the forehead.”