The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China

The red guard movement came to a dramatic end on July 28, 1968. In the early hours of that day, Mao called an urgent meeting with the five major Red Guard leaders in Beijing in the Great Hall of the People. Four of the five arrived at the meeting promptly, but Kuai Dafu of Tsinghua University was nowhere to be found; he was trapped in the middle of violent factional battles on campus. When he was finally located and brought to the meeting room, Kuai burst into tears upon seeing Mao. Mao stood up to shake hands with Kuai, who then reported to Mao that Tsinghua University was in grave danger and the students there were being attacked by workers under the control of a black hand behind the scene. Mao’s response was firm and stern: “If you want to catch the “black hand,” the “black hand” is me. What can you do to me?”¹

Kuai’s rise to power and stardom had depended on Mao’s personal support. He had been tutored and cultivated as a storm trooper of the Red Guard movement in Beijing and then nationally. He had always thought Mao would stand behind him. The moment that Mao told him, with the other student leaders and all the top party leaders listening, that Mao himself had sent a worker militia to suppress the Red Guard movement, was highly symbolic. The same young “storm troopers” who had enjoyed the national limelight for two years were now cast out of favor. The curtain fell inexorably on the Red Guard movement.

The story of Red Guard generation, however, did not end there. Back in October 1967, small groups of middle school students had already started going to the countryside in what would soon become a new national campaign known as “Up to the Mountains, Down to the Villages.” From then to the end of 1969, in over a period of two years, about 4.6 million middle school students were sent from their urban residences to settle in China’s vast rural areas.2

In the previous chapters I have argued that the escalation of Red Guard factionalism was inseparable from the competition between rival factions to enact a great world-historical revolution. The Red Guard movement was a drama of revolution. The question now is this: What happened to the “characters” of the drama once the curtain fell?

In a way, what happened in this case was not so different from what happens to actors performing a drama in a theater. Like dramatic characters, students returned to their routine lives. Yet this was no ordinary return, but one that was full of new drama. For one thing, the young people did not return to their pre–Cultural Revolution school life, but instead left school for entirely unexpected and new destinations and occupations: that of being farmers in agricultural rural areas. There were of course other trajectories. Small numbers of lucky ones, more likely than not from cadre or military families, joined the army, the dream occupation of the youth of that generation. Others became factory workers, probably the next best job, second only to joining the army. Still others suffered persecution of one form or another in the campaign to “cleanse class ranks” that followed the Red Guard movement. Some, such as the dissenting authors Yang Xiguang and Lu Li’an, were sentenced to long years in prison. But the vast majority were sent away from home to rural areas, some at the young age of fifteen or sixteen. And for the vast majority, the end of the Red Guard movement and what came afterward was an experience of falling from grace. Coming in the wake of the Red Guard movement, the sent-down campaign added a painful sense of betrayal to disillusionment. There was a feeling of loss. In a 1968 English newspaper report, a former Cantonese Red Guard was quoted as saying, “We were already refuse when we went to the countryside.”³ Yet, as the authors of the same report wrote, the banishment of the Red Guards to the villages gave them time “to think and brood.”⁴

In this chapter and in chapter 5 I trace how youth of the Red Guard generation made sense of their new life experiences and how their new experiences affected their sense of personal identity and their understanding of politics and society. Historical circumstances, partly of their own making and partly beyond their control, decisively taught them that their role as characters in the grand historical drama of an imagined revolution had come to an end. With the end of that drama, the script that had guided their thinking and action had lost much of its magic. Thrust into new circumstances, they would have to learn new scripts of life—indeed, new outlooks, new values, and new moral frameworks. The new scripts they gradually learned contradicted and further eroded the scripts that had guided them in the Red Guard movement. Thus, by the end of the sent-down movement and the Cultural Revolution, they had experienced a deep personal transformation and attained new understandings of self and society. These new understandings, I will argue, provided the social foundation for China’s great reversal from the ideology of class struggle to the ideology of economic development at the beginning of the reform era, as well as for new forms of political activism that would have reverberations all the way until the student protests in 1989.

This chapter first reviews the history of the sent-down campaign and discusses its connections with the Red Guard movement. Then I will turn to aspects of their experiences that shaped, or rather reshaped, their moral frameworks. Unlike earlier chapters that have either a regional focus (Chongqing) or a thematic focus (dissent), this chapter is not confined to a region or a narrow theme, but rather surveys the experiences of the Red Guard generation in broad terms. My evidence is drawn from personal documents such as diaries, letters, songs, and literary works produced in the middle of the Cultural Revolution as well as retrospective writings and interviews. The nature of my evidence puts some limits on the generalizability of the findings. I do not pretend that the conclusions I draw apply to the entire Red Guard generation. They represent, rather, the views and experiences of the more articulate members of the generation, those who have contributed to the vast library of works about this generation through their own writings. Yet the vast size of the treasure trove of works produced by this generation attests to some degree of commonality in the experiences.

Given the extraordinary character of the about-face from the Red Guard movement to the sent-down campaign, it is necessary to introduce a few new concepts for framing the analysis in these two chapters.

The Values of Ordinary Life

“Ordinary life” refers to the productive and reproductive activities of individual persons, in contrast to the Aristotelian “good life” deemed morally superior to mere “life.” Daily labor and family life are among the concerns of an “ordinary life.” The affirmation of ordinary life is thus the affirmation of the values of everyday existence. Max Weber speaks of the affirmation of “worldly life,” which developed as an unintended consequence of a religious movement and its associated doctrines.5 For Charles Taylor, ordinary life refers to “those aspects of human life concerned with production and reproduction, that is, labour, the making of the things needed for life, and our life as sexual beings, including marriage and the family.”⁶ Taylor argues that the rise of the values of these aspects of human life was a modern phenomenon in Western culture. Earlier Western views of human life were dominated by Aristotle’s distinction between “life and the good life.” For Aristotle, life was mere existence and hence played only an infrastructural role in relation to the good life. In a good life, as Taylor puts it, “men deliberate about moral excellence, they contemplate the order of things; of supreme importance for politics, they deliberate together about the common good, and decide how to shape and apply the laws.”⁷ The citizen ethic contained in this view of the good life endorsed an ethical hierarchy. It exalted the lives of contemplation and participation and degraded the lives of the common householder. It was analogous to the aristocratic ethic of honor, in which the life of the warrior or ruler was deemed superior to the life of the ordinary people.

The affirmation of the values of ordinary life thus upset the ethical hierarchies endorsed by the ethic of the “good life.” In Taylor’s words, this change “displaces the locus of the good life from some special range of higher activities and places it within ‘life’ itself. The full human life is now defined in terms of labour and production, on one hand, and marriage and family life, on the other.”⁸ As I will show later in this chapter, it is the growth of similar values among sent-down youth that justifies characterizing this twentieth-century Chinese phenomenon as the affirmation of ordinary life. To understand its historical significance, it is useful to put this trend in longer historical perspective. The next section provides such a historical perspective by discussing the neo-Confucian notion of the moral self.

The Neo-Confucian Notion of the Moral Self

There is a rich literature on Confucian morality and self-cultivation,⁹ as well as historical studies of key Confucian figures in modern and early modern China.¹⁰ However, Thomas Metzger’s work provides the most relevant background for my argument, because he not only shows clearly the key characteristics of the neo-Confucian notion of the moral self but also demonstrates its continuity with notions of the self still influential in the Maoist era. The historical significance of the affirmation of the values of ordinary life among sent-down youth cannot be fully appreciated without an understanding of the enduring influence of the neo-Confucian notion of the moral self.

Metzger’s analysis is based on an explication of the works of the modern-day neo-Confucian scholar Tang Junyi (1909–1978). Tang’s works were chosen as his focus, not because they were the most popular or the most philosophically rigorous, but because they provide “a richly detailed and comprehensive interpretation of the neo-Confucian position within an analytical framework easily accessible to those accustomed to modern days of thought.”11

According to Metzger, Tang’s vision of the neo-Confucian notion of the self “can be summed up as the participation of the self in a noumenal flow of empathy. Instead of a Humean self cut off from the cosmos except for a flow of fragmentary sense impressions, T’ang describes a self that shares feelings of empathy with the cosmos’s immanently ordered processes of transformation” (33). The mutual empathy between self and heaven not only means that the self is a conscious self, but also that it is aware that this feeling of empathy is “given” by the objective noumenal world and that the self is engaged in constant interchanges of empathy with the cosmic force. Such interchanges have a context of inexhaustibility and are inherently subsumable under universal and transcendent categories. It is this relationship between the self and the cosmos—an ethos of interdependence—that gives the Confucian notion of the self a “pathos of immensity” and “a kind of Panglossian optimism” (36). Metzger further explains,

For Confucians, man in his ordinary condition has available to him a power which the Judeo-Christian tradition reserves for god. Because man draws on sources of moral power “given” to him by “heaven,” man is not god. But man is godlike because he is the sole existing vehicle of that moral assertion needed to put the world right. Other aspects of human experience . . . also contribute to the godlike quality of Confucian self-assertion: a feeling of oneness with “heaven,” involving a pathos of immensity; the direct experience of a noumenal, Panglossian world free of grounds for angst and teleologically unproblematic; an intellectual ability to know this world, both as fact and as value, with complete objectivity; and the ability, based on utilizing man’s unique moral energy with complete intellectual objectivity, to achieve a society free of the distortions of self-interest.

[38–39]

The Neo-Confucian Predicament and the Maoist Synthesis

The notion of a godlike autonomous self is also the source of the neo-Confucian predicament. The belief in the presence of the divine in the self cannot preclude the anxiety that the divine force of the cosmos has an eternal tendency toward elusiveness, because the divine “was almost imperceptible in its subtlety” and typically “in the process of being ‘lost’” (198). What was important was the belief in the existence of a transformative power within the cosmos and in the activation of this power by human efforts.

According to Metzger, this belief was the foundation of a wide-spread optimism among twentieth-century Chinese. The optimism arose and kept growing because now it seemed that “the material as well as the political and ideological means were at hand” of building a society according with the neo-Confucian morality of interdependence (214). It is at this point that Metzger turns to show the links between neo-Confucianism and Maoism.

One of Metzger’s central arguments is that Confucian values, instead of quickly fading away in China’s modernization project, have actually persisted as “the inertia of the past.” These indigenous values, moreover, account for China’s success after 1949, as economic and technological conditions had accounted for China’s failures in the early period of modernization (197). How had Confucianism meshed with Maoism to sustain its vitality?

Metzger notes that many Chinese intellectuals in the twentieth century struggled in vain to explain how a focus on the external instrumentalities of life could be a way of realizing one’s “inner” moral nature within the context of an “interdependent” society and cosmos or how a transformative outer cosmos could be linked to the inner self. The problem was solved by Mao: “Part of the importance of Maoism lies in the fact that it offered an answer to this problem, using dialectical cosmological laws to show how selfless participation in mass movements constituted the very essence of the personal quest for truth and morality. In Mao’s thought, the kung-fu (efficacious moral efforts) of the individual were once more organically connected to the processes of transformation” (230–31).

For my purpose, what is important is not the degree of successful connection between the self and the cosmos in Mao’s thought, but the persistence of the kind of Panglossian optimism and “pathos of immensity” in the neo-Confucian notion of the moral self in twentieth-century China. Earlier in the century, one of the great modern Confucians, Kang Youwei, pronounced: “The purpose of my creation was to save the masses of living things, even if instead of residing in heaven, I would go to purgatory to save them; if instead of going to the Pure Land, I had to come to this unclean world to save them; and if instead of being an emperor or a king, I became a common scholar in order to save them. . . . Thus every day the salvation of society was uppermost in my thoughts and every moment the salvation of society was my aim in life, and for this aim I would sacrifice myself.”12

In 1966 members of the first Red Guard organization pledged: “We are the guards of red power. The Party Central and Chairman Mao are our mountain of support. Liberation of all mankind is our righteous responsibility. Mao Zedong Thought is the highest guiding principle for all our actions. We pledge: to protect the Party Central and our great leader Chairman Mao, we are determined to shed our last drop of blood!”¹³

Despite differences in content and context, these pronouncements both effused over a sense of divine power of the kind typical of the neo-Confucian notion of the self. They both exhibited an aspiration to purportedly higher orders of life and an implicit rejection of the values of ordinary life. The Red Guard pledge was characteristic of the identity of the Red Guard generation at the beginning of the Red Guard movement. It was only in the course of the movement and then in the rustication period that this self-understanding began to change. The affirmation of the values of ordinary life in the rustication period constituted a crucial aspect of this change.

Rustication before the Cultural Revolution

The policy of sending urban youth to settle in rural areas had existed for over a decade before the Red Guard movement. That early practice aimed to accelerate agricultural development and resolve problems of urban unemployment and the shortage of educational opportunities for youth.¹⁴ A national agricultural development program issued in January 1956 first proposed plans for reclaiming wasteland, increasing the area of arable land and developing state-run farms. According to this program, the labor force for this development plan would be drawn from the unemployed urban population, including elementary school students who could not go on to middle schools or middle school students who could not enter college. On April 8, 1957, People’s Daily editorialized about “Questions Concerning the Participation in Agricultural Production of Elementary and Middle School Students.” For the first time, it clarified the policy for elementary and middle school students who could not go on to a higher grade to migrate to the countryside and take part in agricultural labor.15 In 1957, over ten thousand urban students were sent to settle in the countryside.¹⁶ From 1958 to 1959, about fifteen thousand more were sent down.¹⁷ Beginning in 1962, the government consolidated its campaign by setting up a special commission under the State Council to take charge of this issue. From then until 1966, 1.29 million urban youth settled in the countryside or on state farms.¹⁸ The Red Guard movement inadvertently put a stop to this rustication policy because, during the movement, many of these youth went back to the cities and established their own Red Guard organizations, demanding to return to work in the cities.

Continuities and Discontinuities

The sent-down campaign was launched again in the middle of the Red Guard movement and did not come to an official end till about 1980. In this period, 17 million students were sent to the countryside.¹⁹ Of these, 4.6 million belonged to the generation that experienced the Red Guard movement. This 4.6-million cohort left for the countryside over a two-year period, from the latter half of 1967 to the spring of 1969. Chinese historians have divided this two-year history of rustication into three stages.²⁰ The first stage started in October 1967 and lasted till the spring of 1968. The symbolic beginning of the first stage took place on October 9, 1967, when ten students in Beijing made a pledge on Tiananmen Square and then set off to Inner Mongolia as “educated youth” amidst great media fanfare. Overall, departures at this stage were voluntary. Many enthusiastically embraced rustication as an opportunity to carry the Red Guard movement to the countryside. Some resorted to extreme actions to show their will to go to the countryside. One woman I interviewed told me she cut her own finger and wrote a letter in blood to show her determination. Table 4.1 shows the number of forerunners of rustication, the time they started rustication, and their destinations.

Table 4.1 Forerunners of Rustication, 1967–1968

Sources: Compiled by author.

The second stage lasted from the summer of 1968 to December 21, 1968. During this period, local authorities mobilized students vigorously to leave for the countryside and the program turned into a political campaign. The third stage covered the period from December 22, 1968, to the spring of 1969. This stage opened with the publication of a speech by Mao on December 22, 1968, calling on Chinese youth to embrace the campaign and receive reeducation among the peasants. The slogan, “Up to the Mountains, Down to the Villages, to receive reeducation among the poor, lower, and middle peasants” splattered the front pages of local and national newspapers. From then until the spring of 1969, the vast majority of middle school students of the classes of 1967, 1968, and 1969 were dispatched to the countryside through cajoling or coercion, later coming to be known as the laosanjie, the old three classes.

There were important continuities between the Red Guard movement and the first stage of the sent-down campaign. Both involved students who were in middle school from 1966 to 1968. This biographical continuity meant that a degree of continuity would retain in the activities of those involved. For example, many Red Guards thought of rustication as a new stage of the Red Guard movement or a new revolutionary alternative.

Red Guards came to embrace rustication as a revolutionary alternative through a learning process. This process involved two crucial lessons. The first lesson came from the disillusionment with the Red Guard movement. On the one hand, there was dissatisfaction with the decline of the movement after military training teams took over control of the middle schools in Beijing after March 1967. On the other hand, there was dissatisfaction with the factional struggles that had been raging among middle school and college Red Guards. One former Red Guard in Beijing recalls, “In April 1967, Red Guards broke up. At this time, I began to feel that factional fights really were quite meaningless. . . . Therefore, I approved of taking a road of integrating with workers and peasants.”21 Another one said,

By the end of 1966 and early 1967, many Red Guards became confused about how to carry on the movement. Some became tired of the previous stage of the movement. Therefore, in some schools, people started to debate about the situation. We studied the works of Chairman Mao in search of theories. At this time, some people raised the question of integrating with workers and peasants. They believed that student movements would come to nothing if they did not integrate with workers and peasants. The Red Guard Movement must take this necessary step.²²

The second lesson came from Red Guards’ experience in the Great Linkup (da chuan lian) period of the Red Guard movement. One unintended consequence of the Great Linkup was that it broadened the horizons of the participants. They visited new places and saw new people. The destitute living conditions they saw in rural China began to change their understanding of Chinese society. Small groups even began to think about how to further study China’s rural conditions and help transform them. Under these circumstances, some Red Guards conducted “social investigations” on their linkup trips as a means of improving their understanding of China’s social problems.²³

In addition to “social investigations,” some Red Guards on linkup trips stayed in the villages they passed through to live and work with the peasants. The best-known example is that of Cai Lijian, a female student in the Changxindian Railway Middle School in 1966. In December 1966, together with three other Red Guard friends, Cai went on a “long march” to Yan’an by foot. On their way, they entered a small village called Dujiashan. There were only five families in the village, with a total of sixteen family members. Of these, only four could be counted as labor force, and the youngest of the four was over forty years old. Life was difficult in the village. After a one-day stopover, the Red Guards continued on their way to Yan’an. Several days later, however, Cai parted company with her friends and walked alone back to the village they had just visited. Soon, school resumed and she was called back to Beijing. Cai deposited all her luggage in a peasant’s home and returned to school. Upon seeing the widespread factional struggles in Beijing, Cai put up a poster and expressed her yearning to go and live in the village of Dujiashan in search of a new revolutionary path. She eventually returned to the village in March 1968 and was joined by four classmates two months later.24 Many other Red Guards chose to go to the countryside because of their exposure to rural conditions during the Great Linkup. It is in this sense that, as one Chinese scholar argues, the sent-down movement may be viewed as a continuation of the Red Guard movement.²⁵

There were fundamental differences, of course. The social context had changed. The Red Guard movement was mostly an urban phenomenon, whereas the sent-down movement had a rural setting. The Red Guard movement involved rebellion and protest, whereas the sent-down movement was about rural labor. The goals of the Red Guard movement were amorphous and varied with factional alignments in different regions. Nationally, the abstract goal of the Red Guard movement was about defending the party from the dangers of revisionism and about “rebellion” against authorities and “capitalist roaders.” The official goal of the sent-down movement was the reeducation of students by peasants. In Mao’s own words, “It is very necessary for sent-down youths to go to the countryside and receive reeducation by the poor and lower-middle peasants.”²⁶ Behind the ideological smoke screen of the term, Thomas Bernstein’s analysis shows that the purpose of reeducation was to resocialize the elitist attitudes of urban youth so that they would become qualified “revolutionary successors,” a concern of Chinese leaders since the mid-1950s.²⁷ In addition, as Bernstein argues, the sent-down movement had two other unstated goals: to remove fractious Red Guards from the cities to restore order and stability and to tackle the worsening problem of urban unemployment. More recent studies confirm Bernstein’s conclusions, although Michel Bonnin argues that the sent-down movement was more about the political transformation of the young generation’s consciousness than about solving the problem of urban unemployment.²⁸

Making a Living in Villages

The continuities and discontinuities between the Red Guard and the sent-down movements complicated the process of reaggregation such that it became a new beginning in the life journey of the Red Guard generation. It was new because members of the generation faced profoundly new problems in the rustication period. These were the problems of subsistence and meaning.

The destinations of rustication were mainly of two kinds, villages and the so-called production and construction corps (sheng chan jian she bing tuan). The corps were state farms with a paramilitary organization. Because construction corps were state enterprises, the sent-down youth there earned salaries in addition to a variable amount of housing and medical care. Materially, they were better off than youth sent to villages. In the words of one interviewee, “youth in construction corps did not experience hunger, while those sent to villages did.”29

Students sent to the villages were provided for only in the first year. Afterward, they had to make their own living. This was no easy job, even for the villagers. Urban youth faced additional difficulties because they had to learn from scratch. For them, farm labor was hard and the pay was often excessively low. In many villages a full day’s labor could only earn a few cents. As a result, after several years in the countryside, many urban youth could still not support themselves and had to depend on their parents for some financial assistance. According to a government document issued in July 1973, of the total number of 4.2 million youth remaining in the villages or corps in 1973, only 1.43 million or 34 percent could earn their own food, clothing, and some pocket money to spend; 35 percent could earn their food, but needed family assistance for clothing and other daily necessities; and 31 percent could not even earn their own food.³⁰ Apart from the difficulties of earning a meal, housing was another serious problem. The same document shows that in 1973, 64 percent of the 4.2 million youth, or 2.68 million, had been provided with housing, but the other 1.52 million lived either with local peasants or in temporary housing facilities.³¹ Rural life was an utterly unexpected challenge for the sent-down youth.

The hardships were recorded in diaries. According to an entry dated April 18, 1969 written by a young man sent to Yan’an, Shaanxi: “We are extremely short of grain. Every day, we had to eat a lot of wild herbs and husks as substitute food. We mix dandelion, hare’s lettuce, buckwheat, and things of this kind into our food. Life is very hard.”³² Another entry dated June 3, 1969, written by a sent-down youth in Yanggao, Shanxi has the following:

Why are we sent to the countryside as peasants, but are not provided with living expenses? Does the government have financial difficulties? Why is there no explanation then? . . . This makes me very doubtful. If this problem is not solved within half a year, I will go to the commune to borrow money. I cannot depend on my parents for my whole life. I’m dissatisfied, because the value of work is low here, there are no subsidies, and there is no way I can support myself. Even if this is a thought reform, basic living should be guaranteed. It is correct to work by living a hard life, and I will never work for my personal interests, property, or family in my life. However, I want to live an economically independent life, to be able to make a living for myself. . . . Let me plan how to spend the 5 yuan that I borrowed: a little over two yuan for a lampshade, sesame oil, vegetables, salt, soy sauce, newspapers, and stamps; about 53 cents as pocket money; and then there is a little over 1.7 yuan left. Unbelievable! More than two yuan for half a month. I would need at least more than 5 yuan a month.33

As this diary entry indicates, faced with the hardships of material existence, sent-down youth were compelled to ponder many things—the adequacy of government policies regarding rustication, the contradictions between ideology and material existence, the importance of living an economically independent life, of being able to make a living by oneself, and so forth. The bare necessities of life and the difficulties of making a living raised fundamental questions about the meaning of life, and, as one interviewee puts it, “it was the experiences of hunger, the most brutal aspect of human existence, that forced sent-down youth to return to humanity.”³⁴

The Meaning of Life

Questions about the meaning of life centered on two contradictions experienced by the sent-down youth. One was between the political rhetoric of socialist revolution and the realities in rural China. An awareness of this contradiction had already appeared in the middle of the Red Guard movement. It became acute in the rustication period, when this awareness sprang directly from the personal experience of daily life. In a diary entry dated April 10, 1969, one individual wrote about peasant life in the following terms: “At lunch time, I saw Gou Wa standing at a distance from us and kept smacking on his tobacco pipe alone. I asked Suo Di, who told me that Gou Wa had no lunch. . . . He could only afford to have two meals of thin porridge each day. . . . After hearing these things, I became very upset for a long time. What I saw today was different from what I learned about socialism in the past.”³⁵

These contradictions brought into relief many concrete questions about life and existence. If the socialist revolution had not even solved the basic problem of subsistence, what did it mean to talk about carrying on the revolution? Where was the purpose of life to be located? Was it to earn a living? But how to earn a living under extremely harsh conditions? How did the peasants manage it? Was it wrong to pursue personal interest, abandon the rural life, and scurry back to the city? How to deal with the conflicts between personal and collective interests? These questions appeared frequently in the diaries and letters written by sent-down youth, indicating the depth of their inner tensions. This sense of inner crisis, coupled with the new social conditions, turned the sent-down experiences into a process of reorienting the self or, rather, finding a new self.

Personal Interest

A former sent-down youth in Beijing told me about her understanding of rustication in our private correspondence on March 30, 2000. She wrote in a rather impassioned style that it was a step “from heaven to earth, from fantasy to reality, from speculation to confrontation, from self-being to self-consciousness. Knowing the peasants, knowing the countryside, knowing China, knowing the world—in this process, I knew my self. In a worn-out cotton-padded coat, with a belt made of straw, I bid farewell forever to the ‘delicate girl’ (jiao xiao jie) that I had been. From then on, I began to learn ‘life as a struggle.’”³⁷

What she said here was a down-to-earth nosedive that she went through in the rustication period. By “life as a struggle,” she literally meant struggling to live, yet it was not to live a life of revolutionary glory, but just an ordinary life of labor.

This down-to-earth attitude entailed not only a metaphoric “fall from heaven” but also an understanding of the practical necessities and values of everyday existence. At the same time, the ideals of the “good life” as Mao’s loyal “Red Guards” and revolutionary storm troopers faded. At the heart of this new outlook was the growing valuation of personal interest. It is not that this generation had been unconcerned with personal interest. Until then, however, to be publicly concerned with personal interest had been viewed as morally wrong and politically unacceptable. Within the moral frameworks into which the generation had been socialized, the pursuit of self-interest for the sake of personal fulfillment had been thoroughly condemned. The core values had always been collective goals and revolutionary causes. Slogans such as “Down with the self!” once filled the pages of Red Guard newspapers, when being “selfish” (zi si) was denounced as criminal.38

Sent-down youth learned to value personal interest in their struggles for daily existence. In diaries and letters as well as in recent recollections, I came across many accounts of young people’s initial responses to what they saw as the pursuit of self-interest among peasants when they first settled down in the villages. These responses had an element of “cultural shock” similar to what travelers to strange lands may experience. Recalling his experience, a former sent-down youth wrote that the day after he and a few others settled in their designated village, the village party committee convened a welcome meeting. The party secretary opened the meeting by saying, “From now on, you will be the educated new peasants in this village. You should remember: farming is for yourself.” As this individual recalled, this statement came as a total shock for a generation that had been accustomed to being told to “study for the sake of revolution:”³⁹

From the first day of our rustication life, the contrast between school life and rural life was brought into relief. The fervor “for the revolution” was instantly transformed by the necessity of taking care of oneself. Each of us had a small room, a stove, an iron rake, a sickle, a pair of shoulder poles. We labored and lived; we looked after ourselves; we produced all that we needed ourselves. . . . Here all glamorous slogans and empty words paled into insignificance. The work points that we earned to support ourselves, peasants’ trust, young people’s friendship—all this had to be earned through one’s own labor and production.⁴⁰

In a letter to his family, a young man wrote in meticulous detail about his income:

Several days ago, we were paid our wages in order for us to celebrate the Dragon Boat Festival. One work-point was worth 10 cents. I earned 5 yuan and 70 cents. . . . The one who earned the most got 9 yuan and 40 cents. Zhao Wenzhong earned 9 yuan and 30 cents. Among females, the one who earned the least got 2 yuan and 90 cents. Among males, the one who earned the least got a little over 4 yuan . . . My analysis of this situation is consistent with the conclusion I reached earlier: when your work-points are low, your income will suffer. Compared with the one who has so far got the most work-points, I’m lagging behind by about 30 work-points. If by the end of the year one work-point is calculated to be worth 80 cents, then it means I earn at least 20 yuan less than the top-earning one in the first five months of this year.41

Not only did sent-down youth come to relinquish their contempt for personal interest, but they began to actively pursue it. As Xu Huiying recalled, “In our confusion and pain, we eventually embarked on the road in search of our own personal interest. Many sent-down youth who had initially wanted to dedicate themselves to the rural revolution later left the countryside and went back to the cities, joined the army, entered the factory, or went to college.”⁴²

In the active pursuits of personal interest, sent-down youth began to plan their lives and design their future according to the new values of ordinary life they had learned. One person recalls the significance of this change in the following words:

After they lost confidence in achieving the social goals they had cherished, many people began to take notice of the existence of “I.” They began to cultivate their personal world. They studied scientific and cultural knowledge and plunged themselves into the ocean of books. They designed their futures, drew up three- or five-year plans to achieve their personal goals. They tried to earn more work-points and more money. They strategically looked around them for better positions. For a period of time, they conspicuously parted company with the values they had adopted since childhood: the unconditional melting of the self in society and the collectivity. They had isolated the “I” from society and from the authoritarian will. They had a new understanding of the meaning of personal existence.⁴³

Diaries and letters provide detailed evidence of the young people’s life-planning efforts. They worked out budgets in order to make both ends meet, made daily schedules to plan their time, and designed short-term and long-term goals. They were tortured by internal tensions caused by the conflict between personal goals and collective values and experienced confusions and frustrations when they found their personal goals unattainable. In a letter to a friend, one sent-down youth gave his view about the relationship between economy and politics, emphasized the importance of economic development, and expressed his worries about the future. He wrote, “Recently we are very hard at work—eight hours a day and only two Sundays off in a month. We get our meals and clothes for free and in addition earn 7 yuan a month. What is the future? No idea. If we follow the principle of “distribution according to work” (and what is distribution according to work anyway?), as some people think we should, then the tens of thousands of us will have to feed on northeast wind, with nothing to eat, because we are in deficit each year.”44

Also in a letter to a friend, one sent-down youth explained his understanding of future plans, emphasizing immediate goals over grandiose projects such as the attainment of the Marxist vision of a communist society: “As far as future plans are concerned, I understand them as the goals within a particular period of time, the immediate purposes of life. Of course, this does not mean we have any doubt about the future prospect of communism. It’s just that we have more immediate goals.”⁴⁵ Another advised his friend to be realistic: “It’s been five years since 1968. We are no longer small kids. In another five years, that is, in 1978, what changes will have happened to you and me? This is difficult to say, but I think at present we should be realistic. We should read some books to enrich ourselves.”⁴⁶

The biggest concern among sent-down youth was whether to permanently stay in the countryside and labor as a farmer or to find a way to move back to the cities. For many, this question was a source of great inner anxiety. To reject the idea of “taking roots” in the countryside went against the official rhetoric and propaganda. For those who had initially expressed their determination to carry on the Red Guard movement by integrating with peasants, it was a self-renunciation. Thus there were many discussions and personal reflections about the meaning of rustication. These discussions often led to the conclusion that rustication was not an irreversible necessity in China’s modernization project, an argument that helped justify, morally and politically, efforts to rechart one’s future career by leaving the villages. One diary entry has the following words: “Things always change. They do not stay the same. . . . China’s countryside will change, will be mechanized, use fertilizers, develop industry, commerce and entertainment, eliminate the differences between factory workers and rural peasants, between cities and villages. . . . That means it doesn’t make sense to be a peasant for life.”⁴⁷

In a letter written to a friend, a young man recounted how he explained his views about rustication to two government cadres:

I told them that most sent-down youths were not prepared to remain in the countryside for life and that there were historical, class, and social factors involved. . . . This problem cannot be solved in a short period of period, because it is determined by the material conditions of the society. . . . I think that in the long run, industrialization is the main direction. This is a general law in political economy. Industrialization develops at a geometric speed . . . while agricultural development is a mathematical development. . . . With industrialization . . . the industrial population will increase, and the agricultural population will decrease. Does anyone doubt this?48

By this point, it is clear that the affirmation of personal interest eventually led to the complete rejection of the official policy of sending young people to do farm labor in rural areas.

The Rhetoric of Class Struggle

The experience of rural life gave sent-down youth a new understanding of ordinary people. First, they began to see the emptiness of the rhetoric of class struggle that they had learned at school and practiced in the Red Guard movement. Second, they developed a personal understanding of the daily worries and concerns of the rural people. The result was a new kind of identification with the ordinary people.

Before the Red Guard movement, the moral frameworks into which members of the would-be Red Guard generation were socialized and within which they defined themselves and their social relations hinged on three axes—party, state, and socialism. The building of a new socialist society in a process of class struggle provided the ultimate value orientation.⁴⁹ In the party ideology, devotion to the party and its leaders was promulgated as a necessary part of the central value orientation. Aggression against the “class enemy” was affirmed in the new political culture of the early decades of communist China.⁵⁰

The Red Guard movement turned the classification of the class enemy into a field of political struggle. At stake, for example, were issues such as who had the right to rebel against whom. Both the subjects and the targets underwent change in the course of the movement. One unintended consequence was the blurring of the political discourse about who counted as the real “class enemy.” It began to dawn upon some Red Guards that the class enemy was not an objective existence, but a political label that could be applied to very different social groups.

For many, however, the notion of class struggle still commanded great influence. There was still a strong belief in it and a revolutionary fervor to expose class enemies. As they migrated to the countryside, Red Guards carried the belief and enthusiasm with them. As one individual recalled, “When I first settled in a village in Shanxi, I was still full of revolutionary fervor. Keeping in mind the teaching ‘Class struggle will be effective as long as you pay attention to it,’ I pondered how to wage a class struggle against the landlords or expose a handful of hidden class enemies.” What he found was utterly contrary to his expectations, because, he continued, “Yet our village was so poor it didn’t even have a landlord. There were only a few middle peasants. . . . Soon I found that the peasants in the village had no interest at all in class struggle. On the contrary, they repeatedly dampened our enthusiasm for class struggle.”51

One respondent I interviewed expressed the same idea through a personal story of the first night she spent in the village. She said to me,

As students, we had always considered landlords as class enemies—they were parasites and oppressors. They were dangerous. When we went to the village, we five girls lived next to a former landlord’s cave-house. The first night we were there, we were scared to death. We stacked stools, basins, brooms, and all sorts of stuff behind our door. In the night, we heard noise pushing at our door and seemed to see a dark shadow. The next day, we accused the landlord neighbor of attempting to take advantage of us. But the villagers did not believe us—they seemed to stand on the side of the landlord! They said that was not possible. Still, we made the landlord stand in front of Mao’s picture to make a confession. Later we knew it must have been the landlord’s black pig that had snouted at our door.⁵²

The villagers’ indifference to the rhetoric of class struggle was a source of initial confusion for sent-down youth, but the sense of confusion did not last long. An intimate knowledge of the daily struggles of the ordinary people would soon drive home a simple but decisive point: that all individuals who labor to earn their living deserve respect and those who suffer the misfortunes of life do not do so through their own fault.

Who are the People?

Class struggle had another dimension—it was about the people as well as the class enemy. In the Cultural Revolution, the rhetoric of class struggle was dominated by a venomous atmosphere to expose the class enemy. In the crusade of class struggle, “people” was invoked as an abstract category endowed with moral persuasion and political power. Those who were disowned as members of the “people” could be classified as class enemies and persecuted. The party and the government spoke and acted as the sole representatives of the people.53 This produced a natural logic of identity: to be identified with the party and the government was nothing but an identification with the people. This was a central element of the identity of the Red Guard generation up until the Red Guard movement. It was this identity that began to undergo change from then onward.

A new understanding of the people developed in the rustication period. It was a notion of the people as ordinary individuals with personal likes and dislikes, thoughts and feelings. They live a hard life, are hardworking, may be selfish or generous or both. In short, they are ordinary individuals.

The life documents, interviews, and retrospective accounts collected for this study provide abundant evidence of this notion of the people. In an interview, a sent-down youth who stayed for three years in a village in Shanxi Province explained to me how they changed their attitude toward beggars:

In Beijing we were brought up to think that beggars were social outcasts, that they were lazy and undeserving of help. In Beijing, when we saw a beggar we would hurry away, as if staying away from a disease. In the village where we were sent, most of the villagers had been poor migrants from further north—they had begged their way to the village and then settled down there. Therefore, the villagers had a very sympathetic attitude toward beggars. No matter how poor they were, they would never let a beggar go away empty-handed. When we first went there, we used to drive away the people who came to beg. We had a dog that was especially wary of beggars. Later, the villagers talked to us about the way we treated beggars and we began to change our ways.⁵⁴

A young man who was sent down for four years in a village in Liaoning Province wrote about the good-natured humor of the local peasants. The author was a good storyteller. Quite by accident, he told a story to several village women and soon became popular for his storytelling skills. Thus, during work breaks in the farm field, peasants would ask him to entertain them with stories. Once, he was telling them the story about the monkey king from the well-known novel Journey to the West. When it was about time to resume work, they found Uncle Gao, their team leader, had fallen asleep. They decided not to wake him up in order for the young man to continue the story. So they made a shade to block the sunshine from Uncle Gao’s face, and the storytelling continued for two more hours. When the sun was about to set, Uncle Gao woke up, and said, “It’s late. Let’s get back to work!” In the evening, back in the village, the storyteller asked Uncle Gao, “Why did you sleep so fast?” Uncle Gao smiled and replied, “You think I was dozing off? I heard everything you said!” The fact was that Uncle had pretended to sleep because he also liked the story.

Another sent-down youth described his surprising discovery of peasants’ openness toward sex, as well as their selfishness. As students in Beijing, they had been brought up in an urban culture that repressed sexuality. Talk about sex had been considered shameful and immoral. Among villagers, however, he found that sex was a perpetually fascinating topic. Villagers even had a popular saying, “The sun will not set in the west, if there is no talk about the vagina.” He also found that villagers were not so selfless as they had thought they were. He discovered that when peasants’ private interests were in conflict with collective interests, almost no one would sacrifice personal interests for the sake of the collectivity. Eventually, the image of the perfect socialist peasant evaporated from his mind. At the same time, as the young man puts it,

the hollow and abstract idea [of the peasant] also evaporated. At this point, I discovered the agreeable and respectable character of the peasants. . . . I discovered that only after you had really immersed yourself among the “ignorant and backward” peasants and only when you had developed similar feelings with them could you really understand the term “people.” They never hid their likes or dislikes, just as they were undisguised in their ideas about sex. They were very frank. They were not fond of empty talk. They believed that “one practical action is better than a dozen programs.” They were down to earth to the extreme. They might be cunningly selfish, yet at the bottom of their hearts, they were gentle and kind.55

The new understanding of the people that developed among sent-down youth has had far-reaching consequences for both the Red Guard generation and Chinese society. As a result of such an understanding, the Red Guard generation began to identify itself emotionally with the people, an identity that would continue to influence their moral outlooks and political action for decades to come. Appropriately, a poem was posted during the Democracy Wall movement, at the end of the Cultural Revolution, that expressed this understanding of the people:

Perhaps some day,

When we begin to talk about the people,

It will no longer be hollow and abstract.

At that time,

Each and every painful moan,

Will gather its force like drops of water gathering into the sea.

And high waves will rise that are powerful enough to topple the mountains and overturn the seas.

Every piece of vague thought,

Will condense into nuclearlike power,

And release energy powerful enough to destroy everything.

At that time, the people

Will no longer be an alibi for the bureaucrats to issue orders.56

Consequences of the Affirmation of the Values of Ordinary Life

The affirmation of the values of ordinary life among the Red Guard generation provided the necessary sociocultural foundation for the implementation of the state’s economic policies in the reform era. This is a simple and yet important argument. It is simple because the link seems to be too obvious to be ignored; it is important because, surprisingly, it has been ignored. Even sociologists concerned with explaining the socioeconomic changes in the post-Mao era have focused mostly on the consequences of state policies. Little attention has been given to the social basis of these policies.

Retracing the steps from the mid-1980s to the late 1970s, when the reform “officially” took off, it is easy to say that the changes in this period resulted from state policies.⁵⁷ This state-centered perspective on social change, however, gives short shrift to the grassroots impetus for change. Other scholars have looked beyond the party-state for sources of change. Works with a focus on the rural origins of reform have produced what may be termed a “rural initiative perspective.”⁵⁸ A useful counterpoise to state-centered approaches, it nevertheless leaves open the question of whether or not there was a parallel urban initiative. With a partial focus on the role of local governments in China’s economic transition, the chapters in Zouping in Transition: The Process of Reform in Rural North China edited by Andrew Walder give an affirmative answer to this question. A similar answer emerges from a study by White, who shows that local interests supported by local networks pushed and pulled state decision makers toward change.59 To these works, my analysis of the affirmation of the values of ordinary life adds a bottom-up perspective that highlights the changes in the attitudes, values, and daily concerns of the Red Guard generation.

I argue that the formulation of the reform policies in the early post-Mao period was in part a response to the grassroots demands for socioeconomic change. Their implementation, furthermore, was not as difficult as it might have been, given the dramatic nature of the policy reversal, because members of the Red Guard generation had already been predisposed, through their experiences of rural life, to support economic development in order to attain a better material life.

Two historical developments associated with the Red Guard generation contributed to major policy changes in the early years of the reform era. One was the growing demand among sent-down youth to return to the city and the eventual return of the majority of them. The other was the unemployment problem in China’s urban centers in the late seventies and early eighties.

Beginning from the early 1970s, sent-down youth began to drift back to the cities through various channels. But the policy of rustication remained in place, and many people had to resort to illegitimate means to achieve their goals of returning. After Mao died and Hua Guofeng assumed office as the party leader, Hua reaffirmed the rustication policy in his report to the Eleventh Plenum of the Chinese Communist Party in August 1977.⁶⁰ A national conference was convened in Beijing from December 12, 1977, to January 13, 1978, to discuss the rustication policy. At this conference the rustication policy was upheld by Hua’s new leadership. Although the resumption of college admissions in 1977 absorbed about 350,000 sent-down youth in 1977 and 1978,⁶¹ there were still 8.6 million of them in the villages or on collective farms in 1978. Some began to publicly protest against the rustication policy and demand urban jobs. The first of these collective protest activities took place in April 1978 in Fushun City, Liaoning Province.⁶² Large-scale demonstrations took place in the second half of 1978 in other cities in Liaoning Province, with national reverberations. At a Politburo meeting on October 18, 1978, the concern was expressed by top party leaders that “if all the 8 million people start to make trouble, who could deal with it?”63 Soon after this, at the end of October, sent-down youth in Yunnan Province began to petition government leaders to allow them to return to their home cities. About forty thousand signatures were collected from a total of eighty thousand sent-down youth in Yunnan Province.⁶⁴ A strike was announced and won when the party secretary of Yunnan Province finally accepted sent-down youth’s demand to return home (I will discuss this case in greater detail in chapter 6).⁶⁵

The return of sent-down youth from Yunnan marked the beginning of a national wave. Youth in other parts of the country soon followed suit. Altogether over 4 million of the total number of 8.6 sent-down youth returned to the cities in 1979 alone. Their return exacerbated unemployment in the cities. Urban unemployment was a serious problem in the late seventies and early eighties. Tom Gold identifies four social groups that constituted the population “waiting for employment” in the decade from 1978 to 1987.⁶⁶ One of these four groups were youth who had returned to the cities. Exactly how many were “waiting for employment” is unknown. According to one source, from 1979 to 1982, Shanghai provided jobs for 1.54 million unemployed. Fifty-eight percent of these, or 886,000, constituted youth who had returned from the countryside.⁶⁷ Of course, the unemployed population included other social and age groups, but sent-down youth posed the most serious challenge. By 1979 the typical age of the Red Guard generation had reached thirty. Many of them were unmarried. Without jobs, they had to be supported by their parents. They had grievances and, as the process of their return to the city indicated, they could use the tactics of protest they had learned as Red Guards to champion their cause.

Under these circumstances, semiprivate or private business practices began to be endorsed by the state as legitimate economic practices in a socialist economy.⁶⁸ Such practices had existed before the Cultural Revolution. They came under attack during it, most vehemently by Red Guards themselves in the early days of the Red Guard movement. Thereafter they mostly disappeared, but began to reemerge in the 1970s, first in the countryside and then in urban areas. In the early days of economic reform, state actors had ambivalent attitudes toward private business,⁶⁹ because official recognition of such practices would have far-reaching implications for interpreting the nature of Chinese socialism. The acute problems of unemployment, however, raised serious doubts about the efficacy of China’s existing economic structure. The analysis of these problems led to the conclusion that other forms of economic activities, market oriented rather than centrally controlled, must be encouraged to deal with these problems.

How many sent-down youth were engaged in semiprivate or private businesses after they returned to the cities? Some estimates may be made on the basis of data on the channels of returning to the cities. There were four main channels for leaving the countryside. One was to be recruited as a worker by an urban factory. The second was to be admitted into a college or university. The third was to join the army. The fourth was to return to the cities under the excuse of an illness (called bing tui) or extreme family difficulties (kun tui). People in the first three categories did not have to worry about jobs, but those in the fourth group returned to the cities without job assignments. They had to consider how to support themselves. Of the four categories, those who returned as factory recruits numbered the most, roughly 1.3 million in 1978 and 2.2 million in 1979. The number of those who returned to the cities under the excuses of illnesses or family difficulties ranked second, about 800,000 in 1978 and 1.3 million in 1979.70 This means that about one-third of all youth who returned to the cities had no official job assignments. In addition to these, many youth had simply sneaked back to the cities without official authorization. They too had to worry about earning a living, because they had no chance of finding a job without legal urban residence status. Many had to do odd jobs of all kinds to make a living.⁷¹ Others engaged in small-scale individual business practices, such as repairing radios or bicycles on the streets. These practices belonged to what Solinger called activities in the “petty private sector,”⁷² the embryonic forms of a privatization that was to occur in large scale as China’s economic reform forged ahead.

It remains to consider the attitudes of sent-down youth toward such business practices. I have argued so far that 1. the valuation of personal interest was an underlying factor behind sent-down youth’s return to the cities; 2. their return to the cities exacerbated the existing unemployment problems in the urban centers; 3. they engaged in semiprivate and private business practices that had been viewed as illegitimate; 4. this situation pushed state actors to recognize their legitimacy; and 5. such practices were the embryonic forms of privatization in the process of economic reform. A counterargument may be raised that members of the Red Guard generation had been forced to undertake private business activities after they returned to the cities, because for many of them, that seemed to be the only option for making a living. This may well be true, but it does not refute the hypothesis that the rustication experience significantly contributed to a more positive attitude toward such politically ambivalent undertakings. As noted previously, in the early days of the reform era the political discourse about privatization was ambivalent. There was hostility toward privatization because of its potential ideological challenge to the socialist economic system then in place.73 To engage in such practices, therefore, demanded a self-understanding of the legitimacy of what one was doing, to say the least. For the Red Guard generation, such self-understanding had by then become available. What they had learned in the countryside they could not put to better use after they returned to the cities: that ordinary life embodied the meaning of existence and that social respect is due to all who earn a living through their own labor. It is in this sense that, as one of my interviewees put it, “Without the rustication experience, these people would never doff their stinking airs and go into petty business.”⁷⁴ In other words, by the time they returned to the cities from the countryside, members of the Red Guard generation had rejected their earlier attitude toward what they considered bourgeois practices.