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Generation Next - Graduates of China’s One-Child Policy by Philip Gostelow
The One-Child Policy, implemented in 1979 as a measure of population control, particularly for China’s teeming urban centres, has and will continue to have a major impact on China into the 21st century.
The generation born under this radical Policy represents the generation that followed the end of the Cultural Revolution in the late seventies and early eighties. Born into a nation shifting from its recently repressive past and determined on large-scale economic reform – these are the “only children” of a new and prosperous Chinese economy. A pampered breed born into increasingly relaxed social reform and increased materialism. They represent the youth that would grab the leads of this new consumerist economy and drag its outdated social and political system into line with its economic renaissance.
The first wave of children born under the Policy are now out of school and ready to extend there influence on contemporary China, a society very different to that of their parents, and one that offers a very different potential for their future. The traditional extended family of there parents and forbears is, for them, a thing of the past.
This photo essay represents a focus on Shanghai’s One-Child Generation graduates. Now in their late teens and early twenties, what is there place in this boomtown? And what are their expectations for the future?
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