Contemporary Chinese Studies. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2017. xi, 283 pp. (Maps.) US$95.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-7748-3223-6.
Ning Wang’s book is a psychological case study of the PRC’s thought and labour reform under Mao Zedong. The author focuses on one place, Beidahuang, translated into English as the “Great Northern Wilderness,” a region that bordered the Soviet Union in the northeastern frontier of China. When Wang Zhen, the minister of land reclamation, proposed to establish “army farms” in Beidahuang in 1958, it became the destination for many of the Beijing intellectuals who were labelled as “rightists” during the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957–1958. Ning Wang focuses on the lives of these rightists in Beidahuang’s army farms and Xingkaihu labour camp, “the most notorious labor reform complex established by the Beijing police authority” (83). Using a wide array of sources including memoirs, biographies, oral interviews, and official records from the army farms, Wang invites readers to investigate the daily affairs of labour reform and the mental worlds of the imprisoned intellectuals.
Wang’s analysis builds on a large literature which has demonstrated that re-education camps operated both as forced labour camps and as places where forced ideological commitment to the Party and the regime, i.e., thought reform, was of utmost importance. What sets Banished to the Great Northern Wilderness apart from earlier works is Wang’s dedication to explicating the mechanics of mental recalibration. The political study sessions involving “opening one’s heart to the Party” (64), thought-examination papers, self-appraisal forms, and the cadres’ political lectures in the camps all serve as examples of the bureaucratic technologies that were central to thought reform. Wang takes us into a psychological labyrinth, where he tries to remain as faithful as possible to the varying experiences of the “rightist” intellectuals under confinement.
Since Wang’s primary goal is to penetrate the minds of the intellectuals, he relies heavily on the memoirs and biographies of major figures, such as Ding Ling, Nie Gannu, and Huang Miaozi, who were all banished to Beidahuang. Wang suggests that Beidahuang offered a hopeful escape to some of the rightists who were demonized in their home cities after they were labelled as enemies. Even more thought-provoking is Wang’s argument that some of the intellectuals were indeed “willing to go to Beidahuang and display their commitment to self-reform and self-redemption” (55). Ding Ling and Nie Gannu, for example, saw Beidahuang “as an opportunity to learn from the working class, cast off their old selves, and achieve ideological renewal and spiritual regeneration” (63). According to Wang, it was only when their workload increased and food shortages became rampant that the rightists started to despise their conditions. But even then, the social networks and personal connections of the intellectuals turned out to be the most important factors in defining their experiences. Ding Ling, for instance, knew Wang Zhen from her days in Yan’an, which helped her lead a significantly better life than other inmates, as Wang Zhen continued to supply her with food and medicine during famine years. Huang Miaozi, on the other hand, suffered through ideological remolding sessions that pierced through his mind, as Wang makes clear through carefully piecing together his letters, recollections, and interviews.
As Wang tries to understand the experiences of the inmates, he draws a gruesome picture that includes abundant references to torture and death. The third and fourth chapters in particular resemble laogai memoirs from the 1990s, which Wang makes ample use of. After explaining the conditions of Beidahuang in great detail, Wang devotes the final sections of the book to the process of “hat removal” (zhaimao) and the subsequent return of the Beijing rightists from Beidahuang in the early 1960s. With the onset of the Cultural Revolution, however, he shows that the lives of these rightists followed different paths, and that their story only came to an end in 1980, when the charges against them, along with the charges against half a million other rightists, were finally revoked.
The psychological maze of banishment that Wang diligently constructs sometimes detracts from a closer historical analysis that would have increased the book’s appeal to scholars of incarceration worldwide. Wang limits his historical analysis of labour camps to a few pages in the introduction, where he briefly mentions the imperial practices of exile in China, communist reformatories of the 1930s and 1940s, and the Nationalist (Guomindang) government’s prison regime, without providing a sufficient interpretation of the similarities and differences. His comparative framework, in addition, mostly relies on a very brief comparison between the Chinese labour camps and the Soviet Gulag. This risks dismissing the global dimension of labour camps, which can be found beyond the socialist world. The absence of a deeper historical context leaves the overall impression that thought and labour reform was only a practice of the PRC under Mao. Yet, the contemporary repression of intellectuals and the growing number of labour reform and re-education camps in China’s northwestern frontier suggest a historical pattern that cannot be restricted to the Mao era. Seen through a wider lens, Ning Wang’s work inspires us to rethink thought and labour reform in China as part of a larger global history that continues to evolve.
Ulug Kuzuoglu
Columbia University, New York, USA