16 Lost Generation China's young people have a driving ambition. Youth finds change inebriating, not intimidating. Authoritarian regimes in particular know the dangers of enraged students. Youth breaks all the rules. Youth is colorful, irreverent, entertaining, sometimes shocking, almost always rebellious.
Youth is on the vanguard of fashion, music, literature and popular culture.
But the young are also the first to hurl stones, to lob bombs, to rush to the barricades. For China, youth is the future, in all its mystifying, complex, exciting uncertainty. You young people, full of vigor and vitality, are in the bloom of life, like the sun at eight or nine in the morning. Our hope is placed on you. Mao soon abused those hopes, dooming an entire generation to the destructiveness of the Cultural Revolution.