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Linglei escape mainstream with no destination
By Hannah Beech (Time)
Updated: 2004-06-23 15:29

My motto is to ignore the police because they control our freedom. -LI YANG, 20, The Punk Rocker

"Our concept of freedom is different from the West's," explains Chun, pushing her spiky bangs out of her eyes. "We want the physical freedom to travel where we want, work where we want, have the friends we want. But right now we can't be so concerned with spiritual freedom."

Li Yang is also 20 years old, and he wears a leather jacket emblazoned with the words POLICE F___ OFF. His favorite band is the Sex Pistols, and as Chun cozies up to him, Li mouths all the right anti-establishment things: "My motto is to ignore the police because they control our freedom."

Li's band, Defect, gathers once a week at sound room No. 421 of the Modern Life Art Institute in a bleak suburb of Beijing. The room is a smoky, claustrophobic space just large enough for a three-man punk band and a screechy set of Great Wall amplifiers.

Li grabs the mike and contorts his face into his best Johnny Rotten leer. But Li, for all his sneering and posturing, is hardly a songwriting iconoclast: "Please respect our country/ Because if you don't respect China/ How can you respect us, the people?"

"Some bands in the West hate their country so much they hang the flag upside down on the stage," says Li. "We would never do that. We love China." He is, after all, a product of an education filled with what's called "love country" lessons and history texts dwelling on China's humiliation, from defeat in the Opium Wars to Japanese occupation.

No, Li is angriest about how Japan, all those decades ago, stole the Diaoyu Islands from China. "I think I may want to write a song about it," he says. "It's something that moves me."

It's easy, then, to understand why the nation isn't terrified of linglei, why labor camps aren't filled with cliques of neon-hued punk wannabes or herds of dropout Bill Gates types.

Superficially, China's linglei are suitably outré: the piercings, the leather jackets, the defiant dropout pose affected even by nerdy kids like IT entrepreneur Wu. But, in many ways, linglei are like dogs wearing electric collars that know just how far they can stray without getting shocked.

No one's jumping the invisible fence, because if they do. "We're distracted by all these new things, like new clothes or new computer games," says Chun. "It doesn't give us too much time to think about politics."

Unlike the truly oppressed-impoverished farmers, disenfranchised migrants, desperate workers laid off from state factories-linglei have a voice. But what stand do you take when you belong to a privileged group that can buy all the leather and Starbucks mochas you want?

"Our parents had a lot of unhappiness, but when they were growing up, they couldn't express it," says Li, whose parents pay for his tuition and pocket money at the Modern Life Art Institute. "We have a chance to express ourselves more, but it's harder to know what we're unhappy about."

In the end, perhaps the linglei fear they may just become another consumer group buying linglei products marketed by ads teeming with linglei models. "Everybody wants to be a linglei now," says writer Han. "It's so boring. It makes me want to do something else."

Man Zhou, too, felt he had to move on. The Shanghai native gained notoriety in the most linglei of professions: computer hacking. By the time he was in middle school, he could worm his way into hundreds of government and company servers in a single evening.

By age 17, he had published a book about his hacking exploits and started a software company. But for every accolade he won as an independent linglei came an admonishment for being a bad influence in society. Man tried to ignore the criticism, but eventually he couldn't handle the pressure.

"Every mistake I made was magnified because I was representing a generation of linglei," he recalls. In the summer of 2000, just as his IT company was taking off, he found himself teetering on the balcony of his family's sixth-floor apartment, contemplating suicide.

It was only his father's soothing words and the comforting smell of his mother's cooking wafting outside that kept him from taking the plunge. "At first, I thought I had limitless choices in my life," Man says. "But then I realized that linglei need to grow up and adapt to society. Maybe it's different in America, but in China our culture forces us to smooth out our rough edges and become just another square person."



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