Abstract
Using interview data and a content analysis of personal narratives, this article shows that the nostalgia exhibited by China's zhiqing generation in the 1990s emerged as a form of cultural resistance against the changing conditions of Chinese modernity. At the center of this collective nostalgia was a concern for meaning and identity newly problematized by the conditions of contemporary life. Under these conditions, among former educated youth, nostalgia becomes a means of identity construction. Nostalgia connects individuals to their past, compels them to articulate their generational experience in narratives, and contrasts a past viewed as containing beauty, meaning, and purpose with a present increasingly dominated by economic inequality and instrumental rationality. In its conclusion, the article suggests that the zhiqing nostalgia marks a shift in contemporary Chinese political life from a macropolitics of mass political campaigns to a micropolitics of social and cultural orientation.
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