Globally, the emergence of distinct youth cultures is associated with industrialisation, urbanisation, institutionalised education, mass media, and delayed marriage. These conditions appeared in some mainland Chinese cities as early as the 1920s. The New Culture Movement of the 1920s promoted women’s liberation and the moral superiority of marriages based on romantic love (Lee 2006). Beyond such intellectual movements, many urban Chinese youth embraced a popular culture of Hollywood-inspired films, romantic ‘yellow music’, and the ‘dance madness’ of China’s jazz age (Field 2010). Already by the 1930s and 1940s a significant minority of urban marriages involved free choice of partners. In a survey of marriages in Chengdu between 1933 and 1948, 17 per cent of respondents described their marriage as based on ‘individual choice’ rather than being arranged by families (Xu and Whyte 1990: 715)
When the Communists took over in 1949, they sought to rid Chinese cities of bourgeois decadence, including shutting down all the commercial dancehalls (Field 2010). Nonetheless, the seeds of a modern Chinese youth culture had already been planted. Many urban youth learned to dance the waltz and three-step to modernised Chinese folk songs in factory cafeterias and union halls in the 1950s before such dancing was banned outright. When China “opened up” in the 1980s, Chinese youth revived the partnered dance steps of the jazz age and rededicated themselves to the cult of “romantic feelings” (Farrer 2002).