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‘Young & Restless in China’ shows a generation in its own new moment

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Although I am drawn irresistibly to anything having to do with that big country across the sea, “Young & Restless in China” (KCET, tonight at 9) is an especially involving view of the formerly “sleeping giant” as it yawns, stretches, kicks off the covers and makes its way down to breakfast.

Shot over four years, Sue Williams’ film tracks nine younger-generation Chinese men and women grappling with old traditions and new possibilities in a society that, in the words of entrepreneur Lu Dong, has gone in short order from an attitude of “serve the people and work for others, to an extreme” to one of “get rich as fast as you can and have a good life” -- from ration tickets to conspicuous consumption.

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What would the old Chairman make of his country now? Miranda Hong is a marketing executive who works “in Beijing, in the advertising department of an investment company” -- a phrase that in every particular would have seemed nonsensical a generation ago. “Young & Restless” catches a complicated country in which marriages are still arranged even as women are giving up family for careers.

Self-actualization is the common thread here, not merely Western-style success. Zhang Jinging is a public interest lawyer leading a class-action suit against the government; Zhang Yao is a doctor struggling with a privatized healthcare system that strands many without insurance; Wang Xiaolei is a lonely street kid finding himself through hip-hop.

“Young & Restless” views these interesting times in strictly personal terms, not as the sum of facts and figures but as a collection of portraits, often touching, of individuals living in a moment. Just as every nation defines freedom in the terms of its own near history, each person here defines it in terms of his or her own circumstances. Wei Zhanyan moves from the country to the city, where she works in a factory for 40 cents an hour but gains independence: “I feel like this is my home, where I am the boss and can do whatever I like after work, like listening to the radio or reading a book.” She is the heroine of her own little revolution.

-- Robert Lloyd

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