This is a cover story from TIME magzine. Before you read this article, you should ask yourself at first, “Do you and your friends care about politics?”

China’s Me Generation

By Simon Elegant / Beijing

THIS YEAR’S MODEL: Young Chinese like Liu Yun, 23, an actress pictured in a Beijing dance studio, belong to a generation for whom prosperity and personal freedom haven’t required democracy Photograph for TIME by Ian Teh

Six friends out on a friday evening, the seafood plentiful, the conversation flowing. Maria Zhang — big hoop earrings, tight velvet jacket and a good deal of meticulously applied makeup — starts to describe an island that everyone is talking about off the east coast of Thailand. It has great diving, she says, and lots of Chinese there so you don’t have to worry about language. Her friend Vicky Yang is hunched over a borrowed laptop, downloading an e-mail from a pesky client on her cell phone. An actuary at a consulting firm, Vicky needs to close a project tonight. While she phones a colleague, the dinner-table conversation moves on to snowboarding (“I must have fallen a hundred times”) to the relative merits of various iPods (“Shuffle is no good”) and the sudden onrush of credit cards in China. Silence Chen, an account executive with advertising giant Ogilvy & Mather in Beijing, tells the group he recently received six different cards in the mail. “Each one has a credit limit of 10,000,” he says, laughing. “So suddenly I’m 60,000 yuan richer!” The talk turns to China’s online shopping business, before that is interrupted by the arrival of razor clams, chili squid and deep-fried grouper.

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