Since the fall of the Qing dynasty more than a century ago, young Chinese have repeatedly pressed their country’s leaders to learn lessons from the West. In 1919, the student-led May Fourth Movement demanded a break from old Confucian ways and an embrace of women’s rights and individualistic social values. In 1989, student protesters in Tiananmen Square built a Statue of Liberty out of papier-mache and called on the Chinese Communist Party to adopt democratic political reforms
More recently, a generation of Chinese graduates from foreign universities have returned home and used virtual private networks to read foreign news, check Facebook, and stay plugged into the outside world. But today, many young Chinese citizens are not only angry about U.S. foreign policy—they are also expressing growing disdain for the West’s most fundamental social and political ideas. This is an epochal shift, and it will have profound implications for China’s future and for the U.S.-Chinese relationship.
