Xiaohong Zhou - Cultural Reverse II: The Multidimensional Motivation and Social Impact of Intergenerational Revolution

China is crossing the river as fast as it can. And sometimes the process is more like the spawning run of salmonshopefully jumping up rapids rather than taking carefully chosen steps. Salmons can cover a distance of 300 miles in about three weeks; China is packing the changes of decades into a few years. And what is true for China on a huge scale is true within the small scale of families; within one generation, prospects in life have changed dramatically. Parents have to adjust to new values and desires of their children at high speed. And Chinese children have to walk a tightrope between respecting their parents and neglecting their parents wishes.

John Naisbitt

Man cannot step twice into the same river is a famous saying of the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus. He wanted to tell us that nature is changing all the time. In fact, the same is true of human society. Today, when the changes triggered by globalization and social transformation are increasingly the most remarkable facts of our time, we can even say that one cannot step into the same river Once. Because stepping in is a process, and between the beginning and the end of this process, the changing society we live in may have changed beyond recognition.

Human society has been changing since ancient times, but transformation becoming a social fact concerned with human beings or a theme of human self-conscious thinking is, like sociology itself, the product of modernity (Giddens, 1982: 1). Anyone familiar with the history of social science in the West knows that the main achievements and fundamental rules in it basically come from the so-called great transition from tradition to modernity from the 18th century to the 20th century. To put it simply, the path of change and analysis of its motivation is the entire intellectual heritage of Western or modern social sciences. It is in this sense that we also propose that we should strive to understand in academia the great social changes that have taken place in China over the years from 1978 to 2020 of reform and opening-up to the outside world; otherwise, as Huang Wansheng said, both China and the West will suffer a great loss (Huang & Liu, 2009; Zhou, 2010). In fact, the study of cultural reverse, through the changes in the intergenerational relationship, to see the great changes in Chinese society, is one of these systematic efforts.

Although human society is always in the process of change, there are only two great changes with real qualitative significance. The first is the transformation from primitive society to civilized society, namely the emergence of civilization itself (Huntington, 2010: 47) around 5,000 BC. Another is the so-called modernization that has been spreading all over the world since the beginning of the 18th century. As a transition from traditional to modern or agricultural society to industrial and post-industrial society, modernization is the most drastic, far-reaching, and apparently inevitable social change in human history (Rozman, 2003: 5), which includes industrialization, urbanization, and literacy, education, affluence, increased social mobilization, and more complex and diverse occupational structures (Huntington, 2010: 47). If, in 5,000 BC, neither the human mind nor the complexity of society allowed our ancestors to analyze and discuss the meaning of the emergence of civilization, then, as a child of modernity or change, social science, especially sociology, which has grown since the 18th century, has begun to consciously think about human social change in the face of increasingly frequent and complex social changes, relying on various empirical means obtained by the development of modern natural science. As early as the 18th century, the pioneers of what would become known as sociology, Battista Vico in Italy, Adam Ferguson in England, and Comte de Saint-Simon in France, were the first to contemplate the difference between past and present history, and to attempt a syllogistic division of human history. One sign of the most successful of these attempts was the concept of an industrial society by Saint-Simon, who found the most appropriate connotation for the modern of modern society. Under their influence, the Frenchman Auguste Comte, the father of sociology, and the British Herbert Spencer, the second father of sociology, began to establish change as one of the basic contents of this new discipline. For this reason, Comte established the social dynamics with human social change as the theme, and, like the founders of sociology including Saint-Simon, used syllogism to express the process of social change as the theological, metaphysical, and positive stages. Spencer, on the other hand, takes it a step further by focusing on the changes that have occurred since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and thus naturally divides the history of human change into the history of the transition from a martial society to an industrial one. In Spencers case, the essence of a martial society is its coercion, while with the industrial type of society, organized on the principle of voluntary co-operation, there harmonizes that monogamic union which voluntary domestic co-operation presupposes (Spencer, 1925: 569).