The End of Childhood in Asia

Jan. 27 (Bloomberg) -- Bollywood’s biggest internationalsuccess, after many expensive and absurd attempts to breakthrough abroad, was the 2009 film “3 Idiots.” Based on a novelby the Indian writer Chetan Bhagat, the movie follows threeengineering students struggling to realize their deepest desiresagainst the punitive strictures of teachers and parents. Meetingyoung people from China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan earlythis month at a conference in Hong Kong, I had a clearer senseof why East Asian millennials responded so keenly to the film’sevocation of a life beyond and above conventional notions ofsuccess.

Needless to say, the young Chinese I talked to were notamong the 61 million kids -- 22 percent of all children in Chinatoday -- who, according to a disquieting recent story inBloomberg Businessweek, live apart from their migrant-workerparents. Growing up amid steady economic growth, the SouthKoreans and Taiwanese were not nearly as disadvantaged as thefresh-faced graduates I met last year in Spain (a country withalmost 50 percent youth unemployment rates), who forlornlyinquired about job prospects in the U.K.