Cambridge Studies in the History of the People’s Republic of China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. x, 213 pp. (B&W photos.) US$25.99, paper. ISBN 978-1-108-71249-1.
Emily Honig and Xiaojian Zhao, scholars of modern Chinese and Asian-American history respectively, first met in Shanghai in 1980, at which time Zhao recounted to Honig her seven-year experience as a sent-down youth in a Jiangxi village. Almost four decades later, they have co-authored a fascinating account of the sent-down youth movement to show how “participants in the movement—sent-down youth, their parents, and even local government officials—disregarded, circumvented, and manipulated state policy, ultimately undermining what was ostensibly a decade-long Maoist project” (2). The irony of the sent-down youth movement was that despite urging the youth to learn from rural villagers, it ultimately “re-enforced the belief that rural and urban people were fundamentally different” (5). Across the Great Divide focuses on the experiences of Shanghai sent-down youth in the villages of Jiangxi, Heilongjiang, and Xishuangbanna (Yunnan), drawing on sources such as government documents intended for internal use, local gazetteers, and personal recollections of former sent-down youth.
The rift between the urban and rural was one of the greatest “divides” facing the sent-down youth movement. Chapter 1 discusses the officials’ initial difficulty in mobilizing urban youth to go to the rural areas, facing resistance especially from the working-class neighbourhoods. This chapter also explores the various motives behind the movement’s membership, including non-ideological incentives. Chapter 2 assesses how urban youth tried to settle in the rural areas. The urban youth were unprepared for rural living conditions, and their rural hosts were unprepared for hosting them. The Shanghai Office of Sent-Down Youth proved crucial in remedying accommodation issues that arose from the arrival of the urban youth. They sent weiwentuan (“comfort teams”) to provide symbolic support, and these teams would grow to play an important mediating role between different urban and rural actors. Chapter 3 explores how the presence of sent-down youth, with the involvement of the weiwentuan, promoted an economic network between remote rural regions and the commercial and industrial agencies in Shanghai. Local officials and rural leaders capitalized on this opportunity to facilitate trade, acquiring resources and equipment that were previously out of reach for the rural economy.
There were attempts to reduce the divide between the rural and the urban. Yet some attempts, perhaps unintentionally, widened it instead. Chapter 4, perhaps the most powerful chapter, discusses the regulation of intimacies between urban youth and rural villagers, especially those between urban women and rural men. After a sent-down youth conference in Beijing in 1973, a directive was issued to take cases of sexual assault more seriously. However, investigations and punishment largely targeted rural men who had intimate relationships with urban women. Urban male sent-down youth, who had intimate relationships with either their female counterparts or female villagers, were largely spared. Chapter 5 turns to efforts by Shanghai officials to promote education and technical training for the sent-down youth. The youth maintained a strong sense of affiliation with Shanghai, and receiving such education and training further distanced them from any embrace of the rural areas. Chapter 6 assesses the end of the sent-down youth movement, following the death of Mao Zedong and the fall of the Gang of Four. Without clear instructions from Beijing, local officials took the initiative in returning the sent-down youth, who did not want to stay in the rural areas, to their urban homes. A short epilogue follows to discuss contemporary memories of this movement. Former sent-down youth published memoirs, held reunions, and visited villages together, while rural leaders hoped to build on this connection to promote economic development.
Across the Great Divide makes a significant contribution to current scholarship. It utilizes local government reports to demonstrate the multilayered negotiation processes behind the sent-down youth movement, emphasizing how local officials, and especially the weiwentuan, attempted to mediate affairs involving urban youth and rural villagers. These include offering spiritual support, responding to material needs, and connecting rural and urban economies. Moreover, these local reports show the practical concerns of the rural villagers and cadres, who tried to follow the policy of the central government, while expressing concerns and, at times, discontent over how to actually accommodate the influx of urban youth into the rural villages. This mediation also helped the rural villages economically and infrastructurally, building better connections with urban industries to acquire necessary resources and materials.
As Honig and Zhao demonstrate throughout the book, while the sent-down youth movement upheld the ambition of narrowing the divide between the rural and the urban, it actually further widened the gap. It becomes a classic case of intention versus outcome: despite the policy’s ambitions, it inevitably perpetuated stereotypes about rural lifestyle and the people living there. This becomes most obvious in the discussion of regulating sexual relationships. Rural men were specifically targeted while urban men were largely spared, leading the authors to wonder if male villagers “were being scapegoated for the powerful cadres accused of sexual assault” (111). This is not to undermine the sexual assault cases that actually happened, but to point out how “many rural men (not necessarily the assaulters) were vulnerable to victimization by the state in the course of a cleanup campaign” (115).
Across the Great Divide will be of interest to not only scholars of modern China but also to a wider audience interested in understanding the dynamics characterizing one of the greatest social experiments of the twentieth century. Individual chapters will serve well as assigned readings for undergraduate courses, offering local perspectives on what the sent-down youth movement actually meant in practice.
Justin Wu
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill