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“[Bureaucrats] sit with full stomachs, dozing in the office . . . [and] are eight-sided and slippery as eels.” Mao Zedong1 “I think Mao felt that the bureaucracy had been a lifelong enemy to him.” Ning Lan (I24, 12)2 “We will be forgotten individually but at least we left our mark in history and even though no one would know who we are, at least they would know that in history, a large-scale Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside movement occurred.” Yun Wu (I48, 13) The Rustication Puzzle: Organization among Chaos In 1978 Susan Shirk, a noted China scholar, asked a probing question about the Chinese Cultural Revolution program that ultimately produced a “lost generation ” by sending seventeen million urban youth to live on rural communes, military and state farms, and the Inner Mongolian grasslands. These youth, who were “sent-down to the countryside” for indefinite periods, including life, typically faced very harsh living conditions, hard labor, hunger, potential injury, including sexual abuse, and a variety of deprivations.3 In Shirk’s words: “One is struck with the lack of constituencies for the transfer program: the city teenagers and their parents don’t like it; the peasants don’t like it; the scientific-intellectual establishment doesn’t like it; the [Chinese Communist] Party and Army cadres who are parents don’t like it. . . . What explains the government’s capacity to carry out the program despite the lack of support?” (Shirk 1978, 151). This book provides the first systematic answer, and one that comes as a surprise: highly effective public administration.4 Alternatively known as “rustication” or the “Up Chapter1 The Problem How Was China Able to Send Seventeen Million Urban Youth to the Countryside during the Cultural Revolution? 2 Chapter 1 to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside” campaign, the program was exceedingly well organized in strict bureaucratic fashion from the national level in Beijing, to the street level in the nation’s major cities, and to the local levels that received the youth.5 What makes this a surprise is that the rustication administration ’s efficiency in moving millions of teenagers to their destinations from 1968 to 1978 partially coincided with the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), which was one of the most chaotic periods in China’s long history.6 This multilevel public administrative efficiency persisted even though the Cultural Revolution itself was partly an effort by Communist Party chairman Mao Zedong to purge China’s public administrative system of technocrats and replace them with functionaries who had a high degree of socialist revolutionary consciousness. The turbulent decade witnessed widespread collapse of the educational system, social dislocation, economic disruption, governmental disintegration , family dissolution, tremendous violence, and the premature death of three million Chinese citizens (Chang and Halliday 2005, 569). Yet the rustication bureaucracy persisted and reached the front door of virtually every urban building with a teenager living in it, ultimately engulfing “10.5 percent of China’s non-farming population in 1979” (Pan 2003, 1). To find out how high-level administrative performance was achieved amid chaos, I interviewed fifty-four rustication survivors in 2009 and quickly found that their perspectives differed substantially from those presented in much of the English-language academic and journalistic literature on the Cultural Revolution . Jian Zhang (I52, 3), a professional social science researcher, maintained that the Cultural Revolution remains poorly understood because “for Chinese researchers, it is hard not to be censored so they still can’t say too much, but as for Westerners, who don’t have this problem, they are too creative” in “overemphasizing one aspect” or another and forcing “rationality upon the development and the events of the Cultural Revolution.” His understanding, shared by several other interviewees (see chapter 3), is that “even when it was chaotic in society, even at its worst, the administrative machine—the national public administrative system—was always operating and never collapsed. People changed but the machine was always working . . . throughout the Cultural Revolution” (I52, 2). More direct evidence of this came from Yun Wu (I48, 5), an administrator in a sports organization, who noted that there were “still moral and legal boundaries . For example, when we were Red Guards, we raided the homes of political suspects, but there were procedures to turn in valuable things that we found.” This was confirmed by Jia Li (I25, 5), a researcher in a think tank: What I remember most on that day was that the Red Guard dug...

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