1、The night before I was heading for Scotland, I was invited to host the final of Chinas Got Talent show in Shanghai with the 80,000 live audience in the stadium. Guess who was the performing guestSusan Boyle. And I told her, Im going to Scotland the next day. She sang beautifully, and she even manage
2、d to say a few words in Chinese. ChineseSo its not like hello or thank you, that ordinary stuff. It means green onion for free. Why did she say that Because it was a line from our Chinese parallel Susan Boyle - a 50-some year-old woman, a vegetable vendor in Shanghai, who loves singing Western opera
3、, but she didnt understand any English or French or Italian, so she managed to fill in the lyrics with vegetable names in Chinese. (Laughter) And the last sentence of Nessun Dorma that she was singing in the stadium was So as Susan Boyle was saying that, 80,000 live audience sang together. That was
4、hilarious.So I guess both Susan Boyle and this vegetable vendor in Shanghai belonged to otherness. They were the least expected to be successful in the business called entertainment, yet their courage and talent brought them through. And a show and a platform gave them the stage to realize their dre
5、ams. Well, being different is not that difficult. We are all different from different perspectives. But I think being different is good, because you present a different point of view. You may have the chance to make a difference.My generation has been very fortunate to witness and participate in the
6、 historic transformation of China that has made so many changes in the past 20, 30 years. I remember that in the year of 1990,when I was graduating from college, I was applying for a job in the sales department of the first five-star hotel in Beijing, Great Wall Sheraton - its still there. So after
7、being interrogated by this Japanese manager for a half an hour, he finally said, So, Miss Yang, do you have any questions to ask meI summoned my courage and poise and said,Yes, but could you let me know, what actually do you sell I didnt have a clue what a sales department was about in a five-star h
8、otel. That was the first day I set my foot in a five-star hotel.Around the same time, I was going through an audition - the first ever open audition by national television in China - with another thousand college girls. The producer told us they were looking for some sweet, innocent and beautiful fr
9、esh face. So when it was my turn, I stood up and said, Why do womens personalities on television always have to be beautiful, sweet, innocent and, you know, supportive Why cant they have their own ideas and their own voice I thought I kind of offended them. But actually, they were impressed by my wo
10、rds. And so I was in the second round of competition, and then the third and the fourth. After seven rounds of competition, I was the last one to survive it. So I was on a national television prime-time show. And believe it or not, that was the first show on Chinese television that allowed its hosts
11、 to speak out of their own minds without reading an approved script. (Applause) And my weekly audience at that time was between 200 to 300 million people.Well after a few years, I decided to go to the . and Columbia University to pursue my postgraduate studies, and then started my own media company,
12、 which was unthought of during the years that I started my career. So we do a lot of things. Ive interviewed more than a thousand people in the past. And sometimes I have young people approaching me say, Lan, you changed my life, and I feel proud of that. But then we are also so fortunate to witness
13、 the transformation of the whole country. I was in Beijings bidding for the Olympic Games. I was representing the Shanghai Expo. I saw China embracing the world and vice versa. But then sometimes Im thinking, what are todays young generation up to How are they different, and what are the differences
14、 they are going to make to shape the future of China, or at large, the worldSo today I want to talk about young people through the platform of social media. First of all, who are they What do they look like Well this is a girl called Guo Meimei - 20 years old, beautiful. She showed off her expensive
15、 bags, clothes and car on her microblog, which is the Chinese version of Twitter. And she claimed to be the general manager of Red Cross at the Chamber of Commerce. She didnt realize that she stepped on a sensitive nerve and aroused national questioning, almost a turmoil, against the credibility of
16、Red Cross. The controversy was so heated that the Red Cross had to open a press conference to clarify it, and the investigation is going on.So far, as of today, we know that she herself made up that title - probably because she feels proud to be associated with charity. All those expensive items wer
17、e given to her as gifts by her boyfriend,who used to be a board member in a subdivision of Red Cross at Chamber of Commerce. Its very complicated to explain. But anyway, the public still doesnt buy it. It is still boiling. It shows us a general mistrust of government or government-backed institution
18、s, which lacked transparency in the past. And also it showed us the power and the impact of social media as microblog.Microblog boomed in the year of 2010, with visitors doubled and time spent on it tripled. , a major news portal, alone has more than 140 million microbloggers. On Tencent, 200 most p
19、opular blogger - its not me - its a movie star, and she has more than million followers, or fans. About 80 percent of those microbloggers are young people, under 30 years old. And because, as you know, the traditional media is still heavily controlled by the government,social media offers an opening
20、 to let the steam out a little bit. But because you dont have many other openings, the heat coming out of this opening is sometimes very strong, active and even violent.So through microblogging, we are able to understand Chinese youth even better. So how are they different First of all, most of them
21、 were bornin the 80s and 90s, under the one-child policy. And because of selected abortion by families who favored boys to girls, now we have ended up with 30 million more young men than women. That could pose a potential danger to the society, but who knows; were in a globalized world, so they can
22、look for girlfriends from other countries. Most of them have fairly good education. The illiteracy rate in China among this generation is under one percent. In cities, 80 percent of kids go to they are facing an aging China with a population above 65 years old coming up with seven-point-some percent
23、 this year, and about to be 15 percent by the year of 2030. And you know we have the tradition that younger generations support the elders financially, and taking care of them when theyre sick. So it means young coupleswill have to support four parents who have a life expectancy of 73 years old.So m
24、aking a living is not that easy for young people. College graduates are not in short urban areas, college graduates find the starting salary is about 400 . dollars a month, while the average rent is above $500. So what do they do They have to share space - squeezed in very limited space to save mone
25、y - and they call themselves tribe of ants. And for those who are ready to get married and buy their apartment, they figured out they have to work for 30 to 40 years to afford their first apartment. That ratio in Americawould only cost a couple five years to earn, but in China its 30 to 40 years wit
26、h the skyrocketing real estate price.Among the 200 million migrant workers, 60 percent of them are young people. They find themselves sort of sandwiched between the urban areas and the rural areas. Most of them dont want to go back to the countryside, but they dont have the sense of belonging. They
27、work for longer hours with less income, less social welfare. And theyre more vulnerable to job losses, subject to inflation,tightening loans from banks, appreciation of the renminbi, or decline of demand from Europe or America for the products they produce. Last year, though, an appalling incident i
28、n a southern OEM manufacturing compound in China: 13 young workers in their late teens and early 20s committed suicide, just one by one like causing a contagious disease. But they died because of all different personal reasons. But this whole incident aroused a huge outcry from society about the iso
29、lation, both physical and mental, of these migrant workers.For those who do return back to the countryside,they find themselves very welcome locally,because with the knowledge, skills and networksthey have learned in the cities, with the assistance of the Internet, theyre able to create more jobs,up
30、grade local agriculture and create new businessin the less developed market. So for the past few years, the coastal areas, they found themselves in a shortage of labor.These diagrams show a more general social background. The first one is the Engels coefficient,which explains that the cost of daily
31、necessitieshas dropped its percentage all through the past decade, in terms of family income, to about 37-some percent. But then in the last two years, it goes up again to 39 percent, indicating a rising living cost. The Gini coefficient has already passed the dangerous line of . Now its - even wors
32、e than that in America - showing us the income inequality. And so you see this whole society getting frustrated about losing some of its mobility. And also, the bitterness and even resentment towards the rich and the powerful is quite widespread. So any accusations of corruptionor backdoor dealings between authorities or business would arouse a social outcry or even unrest.So through some of the hottest topics on microblogging, we can see what young people car
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