Experiencing authenticity: Sociability and the double lives of middle-class migrant youth in Beijing

Abstract

Youth spaces, public spaces established by urban youth to facilitate conversations and spiritual exchanges, have proliferated in China since 2012. Through participatory observation in one such youth space, Youth Space A, and in-depth interviews with 20 participants, this article examines the double lives experienced by middle-class migrant youths in Beijing under the conditions of institutionalized individualization. It argues that the highly competitive institutional environment of contemporary China, with the labor market as its core, has systematically pressured migrant youths into a utilitarian institutionalized life model. Under these circumstances, young migrants, on the one hand, are acting as “striving individuals” in order to adapt to these conditions; on the other hand, they are deeply suspicious and despondent, struggling with the paradox of institutional dependency and the need for autonomy. Constructing social interactions in youth spaces has become their way of exploring their “authentic selves”. In Youth Space A, migrant youths build transient “pure relationships” between strangers and participate in public life through noncompetitive relations and highly spiritual conversations. In so doing, they constitute an “authentic self” that enables them to reveal their true inner selves and resist social constraints. However, sociability in the youth space is built upon the premise of “anti-daily life” that precludes its integration into everyday action, and thus is incapable of changing the established structure of daily life. In fact, to a certain degree, it is confined by the logic of institutionalized life, such as utility and instrumentality, thus reducing migrant youths’ authenticity to a tangled, fragile, and place-specific experience. This study reflects on the utilitarian paradigm of the “striving individual” in the discussion of the individualization process in Chinese society, and among Chinese youths in particular. It furthers understanding of the dual connotations of institutionalized individualization. In addition, by analyzing the relationship between public life and the authentic self, it sheds light on the issue of the dilemma of publicness in the process of individualization, and its specifically Chinese manifestations.