Annals of Technology Why a Great Wave of Nostalgia Is Sweeping Through China By Amanda R. Martinez -- * Save this story for later. Why a Great Wave of Nostalgia Is Sweeping Through China At the No. 8 Hot Pot Restaurant in Beijing, a school bell rings at 5:30 -- twenty-five-year-old diner said that it made her want to cry. The classroom restaurant is part of a wave of nostalgia sweeping the generation of Chinese born between 1980 and 1989, known in China as baling hou, or “post-eighties.” In late 2010, in the eleven days after -- a sense of cultural continuity—albeit a variant that favors one’s personal experience of the past. But recent psychological research on the cognitive function of nostalgia suggests that the cause of this wave could be the post-eighties’ contemporary social experience. A number of studies have revealed that when we suffer from certain psychological ailments—loneliness, social isolation, self-doubt, negative mood, and the feeling that life is meaningless—nostalgia can act as a coping mechanism. Such ailments can cause the mind to sift through its cache of memories, summoning up those with a particular -- one of redemption: at first, conditions may have seemed grim or hopeless, but eventually things were resolved in a favorable ending. Through nostalgia, the researchers claimed, we bring back to the surface evidence of past triumphs and close relationships, times when our lives felt safe and ordered. Clay Routledge, a psychologist and nostalgia researcher at North Dakota State University, explained, “You’re affirming the self—’I’ve done great things’—which is presumably predictive of the future. ‘I might be uncertain right now, but just -- ” To illuminate nostalgia’s role as an emotional buffer, Routledge and other researchers attempted to destabilize their subjects’ sense of self. Participants took tests that could be collectively characterized -- non-nostalgic counterparts. That nostalgia could be a source of mental resilience and motivation directly challenges certain critics’ notion of the sentiment as paralyzing, a harbinger of cultural stagnation. “It’s exactly the opposite,” Constantine Sedikides, a psychologist and nostalgia expert at the University of Southampton, said. “When you become nostalgic, you don’t become past-oriented. You want to go out there and do things.” If there is a poster population for nostalgia’s self-regulatory effects, it is China’s post-eighties cohort. As the nation’s first generation of only children—China instituted its one-child policy in -- that supplies Shanghai’s water, and the discovery that the country’s bottled water may be as bad or worse than its tap water), and the resulting stress presents an onslaught of nostalgia’s known psychological triggers. Xinyue Zhou, a psychologist at Sun Yat-sen University, in Guangzhou, whose research has demonstrated nostalgia’s ability to bolster a sense of social connectedness among a diverse cross-section of Chinese citizens, said, “The uncertainty, the lack of -- temporary relief within a safe moment of the past, they are also relevant to the post-eighties’ present reality and their hope for the future—a detail that underscores researchers’ findings that nostalgia can mitigate psychological slights and promote optimism. -- generation to come of age in a China with global consumerism, popular culture, and technology, have, by far, the most universal cultural references through which to express their nostalgia. An emblematic example is the generation’s rekindled obsession with Transformers, a toy line and cartoon, introduced in 1984, about robots that morph into -- Amanda R. Martinez, a science journalist and playwright, is writing a book on the global phenomenon of nostalgia. Photograph by CQSB/ChinaFotoPress/Getty More:ElementsNostalgiatechpages The Daily