China's Sent-Down Generation: Public Administration and the Legacies of Mao's Rustication Program

5 Public Administration and the Sent-Down Experience

“Everything imaginable happened to the sent-downs. Some rose up to the top and prospered but some never even survived their experience and perished.” Ning Lan (I24, 33) “The moment I got there, I knew I had to get out of this godforsaken place. . . .” Lina Liu (I29, 11) “Our generation never experienced youthful dreams, romantic love, or any good days of life in their own time. There was no purpose to our lives. The best twenty years of our lives were completely wasted.” Ying Yuan (I51, 8) “I had a really good time there for the entirety of my sent-down period, and I was very happy and content every day. Every day was a good day, a good memory, and I was just thinking about it the other day—what a great time I had there.” Hong Sun (I41, 22) This chapter expands on the broad overview presented in chapter 4 by explaining the role of public administration and administrators in the sent-down experience as recounted by my interviewees. It examines each phase of the sentdown process from the overall administrative organization to how urban youth were selected, induced to comply, sent to locations, transported, settled in the countryside, and assigned work as well as how they experienced daily life and ultimately returned to a city. The chapter also investigates differences in the treatment and experiences of male and female sent-downs. It concludes that public administration was central to rustication and that the rustication program, in turn, had a substantial impact on China’s administrative culture. It also strongly suggests that the sent-downs’ experiences were more varied than is captured in Chapter5 PublicAdministration and the Sent-Down Experience 104 Chapter 5 much of the previous research and memoirs on rustication (e.g., Bernstein 1977a, 1977b; MacFarquhar and Schoenhals 2006; Nanchu 2001; Pan 2003; Rosen 1981; Seybolt 1977; Unger 1979). Administrative Organization The Cultural Revolution is generally associated with chaos. However, as noted in chapter 1, some administrative operations continued to run smoothly. Rustication was well organized to efficiently recruit and transport the send-down youth to their destinations but performed poorly in important respects. Overall Structure and Operation Formal documents and records related to the structure, operation, and behavior of the administrative units responsible for implementing the rustication policy are not centralized and may not be complete or extensive. Those records that exist are not available to independent researchers, and even the most comprehensive studies of the rustication policy by Chinese scholars contain limited and inexact descriptions of the overall administrative structure and its inner workings (Liu 2009). Jian Zhang, who did professional research on the sent-downs, indicated that the records are scattered and access is restricted and possible only through personal contacts. He also said that official statistics were inaccurate, especially with regard to “bad, embarrassing events” (I52, 5).1 It may well be that the most thorough available understanding of the administrative organization of the rustication program and the behavior of its units and personnel is conveyed by piecing together the reported experiences of surviving sent-downs. As noted in chapter 1, it cannot be assumed that my interviewees’ recollections of such matters are empirically correct. However, the extent to which their descriptions of the sent-down administrative structure and operation correspond with one another strongly suggests that they are accurate. Minor differences in their accounts may be due to changing administrative procedures as the rustication program matured, variations in local organization, the destinations to which they were sent, and their effort to generalize broadly about administrative organization and process as well as incorrect remembrance. In April 1968 the Beijing Revolution Committee drew on personnel from the political team, planning team, education team, and military exercise team to form a temporary Knowledgeable Youth Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside committee to guide and direct the rustication program. Around the same time, the Revolution Committee formally established the Knowledgeable Youth Resettlement Office for this purpose (Liu 2009, 172–73). Subsequently, a Public Administration and the Sent-Down Experience 105 replica of this office was set up in each province, county, and commune, although not in every village, many of which had informal and flexible administrative arrangements . These subnational offices were largely involved in coordinating the sent-down process in terms of relocation, job assignment, transfers, returning to the cities, and providing direct funding to the sent-downs and the...