The night before I was heading for Scotland,I was invited to host the final of \"China\'s Got Talent\" show in Shanghai with 80,000 live audience in the stadium.Gue who was the performing guest? Susan Boyle.And I told her,\"I\'m going to Scothland the next day.\" She sang beautifully, and she even managed to say a few
words in Chineses.\"送你葱\" .So it\'s not like \"hello\" or \"thank you\" those ordinary stuff.It\'s means \"green onion for free\".Why did she say that? Beacuse it wae a line from our Chinese parallel Susan Boyle.a 50-some-year old woman a vegetable vendor in Shanghai,who loves singing Westerm opera, but she didn\'t
understand any English or French or Italian, so she managed to fill in the lyrics with vegetable names in Chinese.And the last sentence of Neun Dorma that she was singing in the stadium was \"green onion for free\".So Susan Boyle was saying that 80,000 live audience sang together.That was hilarious.So I gusee
both Susan Boyle and this Chinese vegtable vendor in Shanghai belonged to otherne.You know, they were the least expected to be succeful in the busine
called entertainment.Yet their courage and talent brought them through.And a show and a platform gave them the stage to realize their dreams.
Well being different is not that difficult.We are all different from different perspectives.But I think being different is good.Because you present
a different point of view.You may have the chance to make a difference.
My generation has been very fortunat to witne and participate in the historical transformation of China that has made so many changes in the past 20, 30
years.I remember that in the year of 1990, when I was graduating from college, I was applying for a job in the sales department of the first five-star hotel in Beijing.Great Wall sheraton, it\'s still there.So after being interrogated by this Japane manager for a half an hour, he finally said,\"So, Mi Yang do you have any questions to ask me?\" I summoned my courage and poise and said \"Yes, but could you let me know what acutually do you sell?\" I didn\'t have a clue what a sales department was about in a five-star hotel.That was the first day I set my foot into a five-star hotel.Around the same time I was going
through an audition.The first ever open audition by national television in China with another thousand college girls.The producer told us they were looking for some sweet,innocent and beautiful,fresh face.So when it was my turn, I stood up and said,\"Why woman personalitise on televison always have to be beautiful sweet,innocent, beautiful and you know supportive?\" Why can\'t they have their own ideas and their own voice? I thought I you know, a kind of offerened them.But actually, they were impreed by my words.And so I was in the second round of competition,and then the third and the forth,after seven round of competition I was the last one to survive it.So I was on a national television prime-time show.And belive it or not,that was the first show on Chinese televison that
allowed its host to speak out of their own minds without reading an approved script.And my weekly audience at that time was between 200 to 300 million people.Well,after a few years,I was decided to go to U.S.and Clumbia university to pursure my postgraduate studies and then strated my own media company,which was unthought of, you know, during the years that I started my career.So we do a lot of things.I interviewed more than a thousands people in the past.And some times,I have young people approaching me and say \"you know, Lan.you changed my life\" You know, I feel pround of that.But then we also so fortunate to witne the transformation of the whole country.I was in Beijing\'s bidding for Olympic Games I was representing Shanghai Expo.I saw China embracing the world and vice versa.But then sometimes I\'m thinking.you know,what are today\'s young generation up to;How are they different and what are the differences they are going to make to shape the future of China or at large the world?
So, today I went to talk about young people through the platform of social media.First of all, who are they,How do they look like? Well this is girl called Guo meimei,20 years old,beautiful.She showed off her expensive bags clothes and car on her microblog which is the Chinese vision of Twitter.And she claimed
to be the general manager of Red Cro at the Charmber of Commerce.She didn\'t realize that she was stepped on a sensitive nerve and aroused national
quesioning almost a turmoil, against the credibility of Red Cro.The controversy was so heated that the Red Cro had to open a pre conference to clarify
it and the investigation is going on.So far,as to today, we know that she herself made up that title.Probably she feels pround to be aociated with charity.ALL those expensive items were given to her as gifts by her boyfriend who used to be a board member in a subdivision of Red Cro at Chamber of Commerce.It very complicated to explain.But anyway, the publice still don\'t buy it,it\'s still boiling.Its shows us a general mistrust of goverment or goverment background institutions, which lacked transparency in the past.And also it showed us the power and the impact of social media as microblog.
microblog boomed in the year of 2010,with visitors doubled and time spent on it tripled.sina.com a major news portal alone has more than 140 million microbloggers on Tencent,200 million.The most porpular blogger, it\'s not me.it\'s a movie star.And she has more than 9.5 million followers or fans.About 80 percent of those microblogger are young people under 30 years old.And because,as you know, the traditional media is still heavily controlled by the goverment.So,social media offers an opening to let the stem a little bit out.But because you don\'t have any other openings,so the heat comes out of this opening is sometimes very strong, active and even violent.So through microblogging.We are able to understand Chinese youth even better.So how are they different.First of all,most of them were
born in the 80s or 90s under the One-Child policy.And because of the selected abortion by families who favorede boys to girls.Now we are ended up with 30 million young men than women.That could pose a potential danger to the society.But who knows, we are in the globalized world.So they can look for girlfriends from other countries.Most of them has fairly good education.The illteracy rate in Chian among this gerneration is under 1 percent.In cities, 80 percent of kids go to college.But they are facing an aging China, with a population above 65 years old coming up with 70-some-percent this year.and about to be 15 percent by the year of 2030.And you know we have the tradition that the younger generations support the elder financially and taking care of them when they are sick.So it means young couples will have to support 4 parents who have a life expetancy as to 73 years old.
So making a living is not that easy for young people.College graduates are not in short supply.In urban areas,college graduates find the starting salary is about 400U.S dollars a month.While the average rent is above$500.So, what do they do? They have to share space,squeezed in very limited space to save money.And they called themselves\"tribe of ants\".And for those who are ready to get married and buy their apartment.They figured out they have to work for 30 to 40 years to afford their first apartment.That ratio in America would only cost a couple 5 years to earn but in China it\'s 30-40 years with the highrocketing real estate price.
Among the 200 million migrant workers,60 percent of them are young people.They find themselves a sort of sanwiches between the urban areas and the rural
areas.Most of them don\'t want to goback to the countryside,but they don\'t have the sense of belonging.They work for longer hours,with le income,le social welfare.And they are more vulnerable to job loes.Subject to inflation,tightening loans from banks,appreciation of RMB or decline demand frome Europe and America for the products they produce.Last year,though an appalling incident in a southern OEM manufactureing compound in China.13 young workers in their late teens and early 20s sommitted suside,just one by one like causing a contagious disease.But they died because of all different personal reasons.But this whole incident aroused a huge outcry from society about the isolation both physical and mental of these migrant workers.
For those who do return to the countryside,they find themselves very welcome locally,because with the knowledge,skills,networks they have learned in the cities with the aistance of Internet.They are able to create more jobs,upgrade local agriculture and creates new busine in the le developed market.So for the past few years the coastal areas they found themselves in a shortage of labor.
These diagrams show a more general social background.The first one is the Engels coefficient which explain the cost of daily neceities has dropped the
percentage all throug the past decade in terms of family income,about 37-some percent.But then in the last two years,it gose up again 39 percent indicating a rising living cost.The Gini coefficient has already paed the dangerous line of 0.4.Now it\'s 0.5,even worse than that in America showing us the equality of income.And so you see the whole society getting frustrated about losing some of its mobility.And also the bitterne and resentment towards the rich and powerful is quite widespreade.So any accusations of corruption or backdoor dealings between authorities or busine would arouse a social outcry or even unrest.
So through some of the hottest topics on microblogging we can see what young people care most about social justice and goverment accountability runs
the first what they demand.For the past decade or so,a maive urbanization or development have let us wittne a lot of reports on the forced demoliton of private property.And it has aroused huge anger and frustration among our young generation.Sometimes people get killed and sometimes people set themselves on fire to protest.So when these incidents are reported more and more frequently on the Internet,people cry for the goverment to take actions to stop this.So the good news is that earlier this year the state council paed a new regulation on house requisition and demolition and paed the right to order forced demolition from local goverments to the court.
Similarly,many other iues concering public safety is a hot topic on the Internet.We heard about polluted air,polluted water,poisoned food.And gue what, we have faked beef.They have sorts of ingredients that you brush on a piece of chicken or fish and it turns it to looks like beef.And then lately,people are
very concerned about cooking oil,because thousands of people have been found recooking oil from restaurant slop.So all these things have aroused a huge outcru from the Internet.And fortunately,we have see the goverment responding more timely and also more frequently to the public concerns.
While young people seem to be very sure about their participating in public policy making but sometimes they are little bit lost in terms of what they want for their personal life.China is soon to pa the U.S.as the number one market for luxury brands thats not including the Chinese expenditures in Europe and elsewhere.But you know what,half of those consumers are earning a salary below $2,000 U.S.dollars.They are not rich at all.They are taking those bags and clothes as a sense of identity and social status.And this is a girl explicitly saying on a TV dating show that she would rather cry in BMW than smie on B bicycle.But of course,we do have young people who would prefer to smile whether in a BMW or on a bicycle.So in the next phenomenon,you see a very popular phenomenon called naked wedding or naked marriage.It dose not mean they will wear nothing in the wedding.But it shows that these young couples are ready to
get married without a house,without a car,and without a diamond ring and without a wedding banquate to show their commitment to ture love.
And also people are doing good through social media.And the first picture showed us that a truck cagging 500 homele and kidnapped dogs for food proceing was soptted and stopped on highway with whole country watching throug microblogging.People were donating money,dog food,and offer volunter work to stop the truck.And after 5 hours of negotiation.500 dogs were rescued.And here also people are helping to find a miing children.A father posted his son\'s picture onto the Internet.After thousands of recent delay,the child was found and we wittne the reunion of the family through microblogging.So happine is the most popular word we have hear through the past two years.Happine is not only related to personal experience and personal values.But it\'s also about the
environment.People are thinking about the following questions are we going to sacrifice our environment further to produce higher GDP? How are we going to perform our social and political reforms to keep pace with economic growth to keep sustainability and stability?And also how capable of the system of selr- correctne to keep more people content with all sorts of fiction going on at the same time?
I gue those are the questions people are going to answer.And our younger generation are going to transform this country while at the same time being transformed themselves.Thank you very much!(Applause)
