The Young And The Restless: Grappling With The Young Chinese Consumer Mindset

China will boast a population of almost 500-million young people under age 30 by 2015. The sheer size of the Chinese youth market and young people’s discretionary income make this market one of the most sought-after in the world. The status and continuing development of Chinese youth culture is especially interesting to marketers and scholars worldwide. Recent media reports depict Chinese youth as restless and as experiencing an internal psychological conflict between private selves and public selves, between private identity and public identity(Griffiths, 2012). Few studies have provided analysis of the causes of this seemingly bi-polar psychological state. The paper explores this situation by delving into the core values of Chinese tradition in the context of China’s contemporary socioeconomic realities—focusing on the paradoxical, conflicting, and even opposing cultural values that are rooted in China’s past and present. Among the dilemmas are standing out and fitting in, individual freedom and society’s demands, and “soaring aspirations and limited opportunities. This paper demonstrates that the restlessness of contemporary Chinese youth is the logical results of feeling trapped and directionless at the seismic boundaries between the culture’s unshakable Confucian values and group orientation, and the ever-shifting trends in individual consumerism that China is embracing.