Portland, ME: MerwinAsia; Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press [distributor], 2015. xv, 364 pp. (Figures, maps.) US$28.00, paper. ISBN 978-1-937385-67-5.
Fifteen million young Chinese were sent to the countryside (or joined the military) between late 1968 and the end of the Cultural Revolution era in 1976. The experiences of these so-called sent-down youth or educated youth (zhiqing in the Chinese shorthand) shaped a generation. The recently published study by Guobin Yang (The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China, Columbia University Press, 2016) insightfully traces the political impact across the years since the death of Mao Zedong of this decade-long mass movement of young people. Yang and others who have explored this phenomenon have drawn on a considerable body of memoirs by former zhiqing. Published often with a regional or provincial focus, with an upsurge in 1998 around the thirtieth anniversary of the rural transfer’s beginnings, these memoirs offer a window into individual experiences. Put together, they amount to a group autobiography of a generation. The writing has not yet finished, even as these participants approach their seventies.
This present volume offers an English translation of the memories of about fifty Guangdong zhiqing who ended up on a state farm on Hainan Island, southwest of the province. The short recollections are organised around topics: leaving home, arriving, locals’ reactions, “Maoist propaganda stars,” hunger, visiting home, friendship and love, moving on and looking back, among others. The urban young people in this particular locality were organised in a semi-military way on the state farm which was separate from the established villages of the local population and on less developed land. A seven-page introduction (whether by the translator or the editors is unclear) starts the volume. This provides a sketch of essential historical background for a non-China readership in order to make the memoirs more comprehensible.
The 81 memoirs together construct a picture of zhiqing life that brings out several important themes seen also in other parts of China, particularly those regions that hosted the youth on state farms and in construction corps (bingtuan). Family background and connections continued to shape the experience of these young people, even when family was between 200 and 1000 kilometres away. Well connected zhiqing could receive more privileges or have access to resources beyond the reach of ordinary youth. Bad family backgrounds followed the zhiqing to their farms. The writing paints vivid pictures of relationships among the young people on the state farm and between them and local people, who included villagers from the Li ethnic minority. All over China sent-down youth expressed feelings about their treatment in quiet, collective, and individual acts of defiance or resistance. The youth on Hainan Island were no exception, as several of these memoirs show.
These memories are of course from one locality and from one kind of farming set-up. The question of typicality arises from reading this collection. How representative are the experiences described here? How do these stories differ from those of young people in construction corps in the Northeast, Inner Mongolia, or even next-door in Yunnan? One collection like this cannot of course answer these questions. Another issue is that this volume, like the vast majority of similar memoirs of the zhiqing phenomenon, is written by people who have generally been successful in their lives since the Cultural Revolution. These are the stories of people who can mostly be considered winners in the system that has developed in China since the Mao years. The brief biographies of the fifty or so writers at the end of the book indicate this nicely. Some memoirs mention youth who suffered in the sent-down years, but generally the tone of such recollections is positive. The zhiqing years made men and women of these writers. Brief statements at the end of most biographies typify this attitude: “After what we withstood on Hainan Island, there isn’t much we can’t overcome” (359). One of the most poignant parts of the collection is the final piece: a transcript written by a better educated classmate of the memories of a zhiqing who served as a caretaker for several decades on Hainan before finally being able to return to Guangzhou in 2010.
These recollections are an interesting, even entertaining read. They provide excellent material for undergraduate courses on modern China. The absence of any information on where they were first published in China can be overlooked.
Paul Clark
The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand
pp. 343-345