China's youth is ripe for an underachiever as a role model, somebody like Bart Simpson.

You may think this sounds like a joke, but the competitive atmosphere that young people are thrust into nowadays has morphed into a boomerang, coming back with a vengeance. And not surprisingly, the top target is usually some kind of well-established authority figure.

Someone like Yu Qiuyu, for example.

Yu is a writer whose collections of essays contain a wealth of knowledge and insight, packaged in an elegant and mesmerizing style. To his peers, he is something of a rebel, giving up in the early 1990s the position of president of a Shanghai-based university and a fast-rising career of officialdom so that he could pursue a "purer" dream of writing. And that happened before he established himself as a best-selling author.

But to a Generation-X rebel like Han Han, Yu represents the "dreariness of middle-aged Chinese men." In a recent article, the young writer, who is also into car racing, expressed his "dislike for the way Yu looks and the way he does his hair, as if he uses some oily food as a towel." On top of it, Yu and his ilk "lack fun, honesty and imagination, and are too shrewd for their own good," and they "intoxicate themselves in self-devised grand concepts."

Obviously, this sentiment is echoed by quite a few people. When Yu Qiuyu "mispronounced" a word while judging a popular television contest early this month, thousands of fingers pointed at him.

It turned out that Yu was not entirely wrong. The word in question could be pronounced in one of two ways.

But for many young people, this is just an inconvenient technicality that should be ignored. Equally inconvenient is the fact that Yu is actually quite liberal when it comes to arts, education etc.

But since icons of erudition are only to be revered when they are dead, Yu should be attacked and hopefully toppled.

If you browse online forums, you'll notice that netizens tend to lump together the real towering figures of wisdom with slick salesmen who are pitching their own agenda. If you say a word that goes against public sentiments, or more accurately the opinions of the younger generation, you are marked for vehement condemnation.

Nobody cares if your argument is well-thought out and is infused with far-sightedness. It almost feels like a virtual replay of the Red Guards indiscriminately knocking down officials whether they were decent or corrupt during the "cultural revolution." (1966-1976)

However, it will be simplistic to generalize that young people are short on maturity or intelligence.

Besides the habitual defiance of youth, an important factor is the pressure they face in eking out a livelihood given the cut-throat environment in education, job-hunting and housing. It is only too natural that they feel the older generation is hoarding all the opportunities.

This generational gap gives rise to a legion of angry young people who sometimes find an outlet for their frustration in targets that may be less intended than symbolized. For example, there are writers with a fraction of the talent of Yu Qiuyu but stash resources they have amassed over the decades. But they hardly raise eyebrows among the Gen-Xers.

Then there is the tradition of piety for authorities. The implied logic is, if you respect someone, you'll agree with his assessment on everything, especially in his sphere of specialty. Conversely, if you don't see eye to eye with an expert, you should regard him as a phoney.

Sitting through a childhood of non-stop tests and made to worship idols of success mostly not of their own age group can be counterproductive. In a culture that believes overachieving conventional success is overrated, heroes are bound to arise from a deliberate choice of underachievement.

Han Han's comments on Yu Qiuyu amounts to a Chinese version of "Eat my shorts," a Bart Simpson insult hurled at his school principal. He certainly has the right to his opinion. But he would have been more convincing if he had earned it.

What we sorely need is a culture of "respectfully disagreeing," ensuring that respecting and challenging authorities can coexist in the same person.

Email: raymondzhou@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 05/27/2006 page4)