YUAN REN
Every generation needs to announce that it is different. But the differences are real in today’s China, a country that has been changing so fast that the experience of each age-group is entirely different to what has gone before.
I was born in the 1980s, in the spring of the new China. When I was a child, most families didn’t have a telephone; by the time I was in my teens, supermarkets started appearing in the cities. It was only once I was a young adult that, in the run-up to the 2008 Olympics, change came full-pelt, symbolised by smartphones and the western brands flooding into the shops. Foreign travel became much easier and young people began studying abroad.