Generation perdue: Le mouvement d'envoi des jeunes instruits a la campagne en Chine, 1968-1980 (review)

Educated youth were scattered to the distant corners of rural China in the xiaxiang or "going down to the countryside" movement of the 1960s and 1970s. They were the zhiqing (short for zhishi qingnian) or "educated youth." As well as in numerous dissertations, books, and articles, this movement has been featured in films¹ and television documentaries.²

In 1975 Michel Bonnin began interviewing zhiqing from Guangdong who had crossed over into Hong Kong. Génération perdue: Le mouvement d'envoi des jeunes instruits à la campagne en Chine, 1968-1980 is his latest study of this distinctive movement. The book's subtitle is taken from the author's dissertation at the École de Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (p. 27 n. 41).

Ten or twelve years after the collapse of the Communist Party's disastrous United Front with the Nationalist Party in 1927,³ early precursors of the xiaxiang movement emerged. Dating from no later than 1940, the movement's populist and anti-intellectual roots were certainly "older and deeper" than those of the Red Guard movement (p. 437). The movement began four years earlier than the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), outlasting it by yet another four years. Bonnin concentrates on the 1968-1980 period.

Two maps, four diagrams, thirty-two black-and-white and color photographs of groups, and reproductions of political posters illustrate important points in Génération perdue. Claims of fact, inferences, and interpretations are documented in 1,560 footnotes. Bonnin's documentation includes individual and collective interviews, published testimonies, survey research, newspapers, periodicals, poetry, novels, official statistics, propaganda posters, dazibao (large-character posters and limited-circulation newspapers), radio broadcasts, and scholarly articles and monographs.

With "modest beginnings" in the mid-1950s, just before "the failure of the Great Leap," the xiaxiang movement experienced an "acceleration" from "institutionalization and long-term planning." More firmly grounded, it reemerged during the Socialist Education Movement from 1962 to 1966.⁴ Then, in a little over a decade, seventeen million "educated young people" were sent from urban China to rural Heilongjiang, Jilin, Hebei, Inner Mongolia, Shaanxi, Anhui, Jiangxi, Guizhou, Yunnan, Gansu, and Xinjiang. Rural destinations for "sent-down" youth were not part of the laogai, China's labor reform system for criminals. Nonetheless, "departure" from home, Bonnin argues in chapter 8, was "a voluntary deportation." The clustered origins and diverse destinations of extensive interprovincial movements of "sent-down educated youth" in the 1960s and 1970s are depicted a single map (p. 193).

Three principal ideological motivations" for the xiaxiang movement were "the formation of revolutionary successors," "the reeducation of young intellectuals," and "the reduction or lessening of the '"Three Great Differences.'" These were the differences between city and countryside, worker and peasant, and mental and manual labor. Accordingly, rural people with little formal education were expected to educate the zhiqing. "Political motivations" were paramount. Mao Zedong's experience with the militarized agrarian social movement that swept him to power led him to value their power afterwards,⁵ especially for reinforcing his own "charismatic" power (chapter 2).

Conversely, China in the 1960s was "different from the USSR where serious development of previously underutilized and underdeveloped territories was a major goal" of sending young urban Russians to the countryside (p. 59). This and other evidence leads Bonnin to reject socioeconomic arguments that the xiaxiang movement was intended to solve problems of unemployment and overpopulation in the cities.

Two organizational changes might have made this lengthy book easier to read. While Bonnin distinguishes between "Lived Experience" (part 3) and "Social Resistance" (part 4), logically these separate sections form a...