The Foreign Service Journal, January 2011

such change occurs virtually overnight. The elaborate corner barbershop that I patronized on a Monday, for example, was gone by week’s end, occupied by laborers working and sleeping there to transform it into an instant showroom. All the barbers and staff had vanished without a trace. On a visit to nearby Fuyang, billed in a 2006 guidebook as a bucolic river town of 250,000 and seat of the 3rd- century Wu Kingdom, I found instead a sprawling city of two or three million people. In the hills of its beautiful riverside park with its Buddhist shrine, ubiquitous amplifiers disguised as rocks incongruously blasted the latest American rap and hip-hop. As elsewhere, tradition has always been based on family, which has as- sured its transmission and continuity through the millennia. Curiously, this remains especially true in Chinese communities abroad, where large fam- ilies and communal compounds remain the rule. Visitors from the PRC remark how much more conservative overseas Chinese in Malaysia or Singapore are than mainlanders. In China proper, however, the one- child policy — initially applied in 1979 to head off a Malthusian population ex- plosion — has over three decades changed the basic social fabric. While draconian family planning, with its un- derside of forced abortion and even fe- male infanticide, has not necessarily produced a generation of pampered “little emperors,” it has certainly accel- erated the rate of social change. However, an unintended conse- quence of the one-child policy in China’s cities, where it was most rigidly applied, was an obsession with change in all forms. Today’s generation of only children are outward-looking, focused on individual wants and open to any- thing new. Some, caught in arranged marriages, rebel against parental pres- sure to produce even a single child, preferring a life of greater independ- ence. With urban professionals as the cat- J A N U A R Y 2 0 1 1 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 33 In wide-ranging conversations, I found the younger generation to be self-confident and thoughtful on most subjects, genuinely trying to make sense of their turbulent recent history. “Washington's First & Finest Purveyor of Furnished Interim Homes” Mother/Daughter Owned & Operated Since 1990 “My friends all envied me and thought I had a great find – and so do I! When I come back for TDY training, I hope you’ll take me again” - Constance Jones (FSO Client) info@piedaterredc.com O: (202) 462-0200 F: (202) 332-1406 www.piedaterredc.com Dupont, Georgetown, Foggy Bottom, West End, Penn Quarter Studio * One Bedroom * One Bedroom plus Den * Two Bedroom - Month to Month -