“When Everyone Plays It Safe”: Time and Transitional Agency of Elite University Students in China

• In Event: 30865 - Centering Child and Youth Perspectives: Young people as social thinkers and actors

Abstract

China’s younger generation—even among its most elite segment—is undergoing a notable shift, as the aspirational ethos of confident striving gives way to a more cautious, pragmatic, and risk-averse disposition. This paper introduces transitional agency as a key lens to understand this change—a form of life course agency shaped by the intersection of historical and institutional time. Drawing on in-depth biographical interviews and fieldwork at an elite university, we examine how youth agency is constituted and constrained at a historical moment marked by economic slowdown and post-pandemic uncertainty. Deglobalization and domestic economic stagnation have created an involutionary temporal frame, defined by rising competition and shrinking opportunities. Although institutional privilege offers elite university students access to valuable opportunities, it also imposes intense performance pressure and restricts their agency within rigid time structures and narrowly defined metrics of success. Instead of aspiring to exceptional success or transformative change, many now seek to secure stable, middle-class careers, while perceiving the state as the primary driver of change and deferring transformative roles to it. This dynamic— defined by diminished transformative efficacy and constrained self-efficacy—forms what we identify as “youth conservatism with Chinese characteristics.”

Authors

• Wen Xie, Peking University

• Jianjun Li, Peking University