Beijing hutong, 2000: Perhaps 20 percent of the old city remains, the rest devoured by developers and government schemes for modernization

The rapidly shifting cultural footing is nowhere more apparent than for China's urban 20-somethings. Take, for example, Yang Ling, as I will call her. Born in Xian to a military family—her father retired before reaching the rank of general—she chose, perhaps as a dutiful Chinese daughter, to attend a local university rather than a more prestigious institution in Beijing or Shanghai, so that she could be close to her recently divorced mother. "Now I realize I probably made a mistake," says Yang, a petite woman of 27 who sports radically fashioned bobbed hair and, she confides, a splendid polychromatic butterfly tattoo on her shoulder. "Chinese children are supposed to take care of their parents and I thought it was the thing to do. But now I think I should have gone to Beijing."

For her fealty, or perhaps because of her family background, she was invited to join the Communist Party but never did. "I just forgot to fill out the paperwork," she recounts. "It wasn't important to me. There were other things in my life that mattered more." For hundreds of thousands of young people like Yang who have migrated to Beijing for professional reasons, the Party is no longer meaningful. "I'm not even sure I know anybody in the Party," she says. "What's the point? How does it help you? It's just ancient history."

Well, perhaps not ancient history. The Party, after all, controls the ferocious apparatus of repression that imprisons journalists, silences critics, kidnaps the child Panchen Lama, and stifles the press. In terms of sheer numbers, the Party machine has forced millions of people from their homes, in some instances for grandiose development projects such as dams and airports, often in craven collaboration with corrupt developers. "Ancient history" comprises the tens of millions who starved to death during the Great Leap Forward, and the millions persecuted and killed during the Cultural Revolution, and the perhaps 2,000 people gunned down around Tiananmen Square in June 1989; these are all legacies of the Party.

In a country where memory is deliberately selective and restricted, discussion of the recent past as opposed to the glories of, say, Southern Song poetry is banished to rare whispered conversations. I was asked recently by a professor of journalism at Shanghai's Fudan University to send him some examples of work I had done here for a collection of foreign correspondents reporting on China. When I offered to send him a long, firsthand piece about the Tiananmen massacre, he started and waved his palm at me: "Please," he begged, "better not."

Yet it is true that for up-and-coming 20- and 30-somethings in a cosseted and increasingly international metropolis such as Beijing, Shanghai, or Guangzhou, all history is ancient, and largely irrelevant. Yang Ling sped from provincial Xian after college to Beijing, where she worked as a marketing consultant before founding her own consultancy targeting medium-sized Chinese companies. For her, there is little about China's history or culture that is either particularly appealing or necessary except, perhaps, the multiplicities of Chinese cuisine. She and other young Chinese live their lives in a world that would fit as easily in Europe or America, a world that is ultimately more recognizable as Western than Chinese.

While Yang devours the darkly romantic novels of Zhang Ailing, she also revels in the hilarity of Roddy Doyle's tales of Irish life. Weekly, and sometimes more often, she and her friends swing dance to Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman. Their taste in fashion is Japanese, European, American. They spend hours each week on Facebook. They travel the globe. They are, in short, the new urban youth whose identities are kaleidoscopic, conditioned by caprice, advertising, television, movies (mostly foreign), fashion magazines, and the imperatives of professions implanted from the West.

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