The exile of “educated youth”: scenes from the Cultural Revolution
In 1968, train stations across China filled with sobbing adolescents being sent to the countryside. But even though the Cultural Revolution was to scar the country, some of the era’s children look back on it fondly. Why? Tania Branigan reports
From a distance, you might have mistaken them for teenagers, Auntie Huang and her friends, though they were in late middle age. It wasn’t just the miniskirts and heels on their slim frames, or the ponytails and flaming lipstick, but the girlish way the women held hands, massaged shoulders, smoothed sleeves and straightened bag straps, giddy with affection. Their make-up was heavy, and their long hair tinted black or dyed brassy blonde – recreating a youth that had never been theirs to enjoy. Auntie Huang was wistful as we watched a couple of students stroll past in the grounds of Chongqing University, green with palms and willows. “Just like today’s young people, I wanted to do many things, like go to university, but I couldn’t,” she told me. “I was 18. I felt there was no hope. We had no hope at all. One person would cry and then everyone would start. It was dejection. Despair.”
In late 1968, the train and bus stations of Chinese cities filled with sobbing adolescents and frightened parents. The authorities had decreed that teenagers – deployed by Mao Zedong as the shock troops of the Cultural Revolution – were to begin new lives in the countryside. A tide of youth swept towards impoverished villages. Auntie Huang and her friends were among them. Seventeen million teenagers, enough to populate a nation of their own, were sent hundreds of miles away, to places with no electricity or running water, some unreachable by road. Some were as young as 14. Many had never spent a night away from home. Among their number was Xi Jinping, now China’s leader.
These educated urban youth were to be re-educated. Their skills and knowledge would drag forward villages mired in poverty and ignorance, improving hygiene, spreading literacy, eradicating superstitions. But the peasantry’s task, in turn, was to uproot a more profound form of ignorance: the urban elite’s indifference to the masses. Mao had seized on the rural poor as the engine of revolution, bringing the Communist Party to power. Now they were to remake this young generation – teaching them to live with nothing, to endure, even love, the dirtiest labour; to not merely sacrifice but efface themselves for the greater good. The reformed teenagers would bear his revolution to its ultimate triumph: a country whose society and culture were as communist as its political system. “At the very beginning we were all idealistic. We wanted to make a difference to the countryside,” Auntie Huang recalled. But the villages were filthy and desolate, and the bone-thin peasants were unimpressed by the newcomers’ theories for grand improvements. The educated youth had been urged to remake the world; they began to wonder if they could change anything.
Some of the farmers were hostile, and even the kindly ones grew exasperated. They didn’t need the extra hands, and didn’t want extra mouths to feed. These kids, for all their books and ideas, were slow and clumsy, had no feel for tools or land, wasted seed and couldn’t seem to manage moderate loads or simple tasks. Income was disbursed not according to need but to work contributions; the teenagers struggled to earn the points they needed to feed themselves, and the labour left them bruised and blistered. Many found that initial extra rations disappeared when drought set in, leaving them surviving on corn husks, as the peasants did. At first they might be billeted with families, but mostly they were packed together wherever room could be made: in old grain silos, tool sheds or shacks.
It is hard to imagine the relief when they finally put these painful years behind them. And yet, four decades later, Auntie Huang and her friends met up each week to play mahjong, eat hotpot, dance and, most of all, to reminisce about those bitter days. I had encountered them by chance, as they rehearsed their steps in a park one afternoon. I had assumed they were all old friends, but in fact they had met online, drawn together solely by their experience of “rustication”, of being “sent down”. For the Educated Youth Friendship Group (I have altered its name, like those of its members, at their request) those years of struggle were their “spiritual wealth”, said Auntie Gu. “We’re proud of being educated youth; it was something unprecedented,” she told me. “We know that nothing like it will happen in future.”
“We had no hope at all. One person would cry and then everyone would start. It was dejection. Despair”
These were the children of the Cultural Revolution, unleashed by Mao Zedong in 1966 and ending only after his death ten years later: a decade of turmoil, violence and stagnation. The movement was an emperor’s ruthless assertion of power, launched to destroy all opposition in the party after the disaster of the Great Leap Forward – his breakneck industrialisation campaign and collectivisation of agriculture, which had led to a famine that killed as many as 45 million. But it was also a crusade to reshape hearts and souls as he had transformed China’s politics and economy. To do so he employed the Red Guards, young political vigilantes – many in their early teens – who attacked teachers and scholars and destroyed cultural treasures.
An estimated two million people would die, including some of China’s greatest artists and thinkers. As the violence rippled out, militias would take the lives of entire families in remote rural areas. In Chongqing, the southwestern city home to Auntie Huang and her friends, fighting between Red Guard groups descended into warfare. The factions, making full use of the city’s multiple munitions plants, battled with heavy weaponry and tanks – everything except planes, one resident told me. But by late 1968, Mao had reasserted absolute authority and even he was tired of the chaos. The military reined in the Red Guards, but schools were closed and unemployment was high. Dispatching the young people to the countryside was a supremely pragmatic decision.
It is impossible to understand China without understanding the Cultural Revolution. It shapes the country’s politics, economy and culture; its scar runs through the heart of society, and the soul of its citizens. In parts it looks similar to the terrible genocides of the 20th century, though in China people killed their own kind. In some regards it echoes Stalinist purges, but with enthusiastic mass participation. No workplace remained untouched. No household remained innocent. “Complicity” is too small a word – comrade turned on comrade, friend upon friend, husband upon wife and child upon parent.
Auntie Gu’s tender nature won over classmates and neighbours. She helped to harvest crops for an old widow neglected by her children. She and her friends taught village kids and put on musical shows for the farmers. There were moments of happiness and even amity. Yet cultures clashed. Farmers were shocked to see girls and boys out for walks together, however innocently, and disturbed as their influence rubbed off on village youths. Maoist puritanism, dismissing romance as a bourgeois snare, looked liberal beside the deep conservatism in parts of the countryside. “If country boys and girls were in relationships, they wouldn’t dare to look in each other’s eyes,” said Auntie Huang.
But the city girls, naive and far from their families, were easy prey for men. Often the victims took the blame – they were educated urbanites, while their rapists, being poor peasants or local officials, ranked higher in political class, which was as much a moral status as a social one. Malicious or obstructive officials had so many ways to make you suffer: refusing rations, assigning the worst jobs or accusing you of political crimes. One of Auntie Huang’s classmates, sent down at 14, died in jail after he was accused of joining an anti-party organisation, in one of the era’s many paranoid campaigns. She lost another friend whose serious illness was dismissed as a cold. Weakened by overwork and malnutrition, many succumbed to malaria and other diseases.
Thousands more died “unnatural” deaths, usually in work accidents. Propaganda celebrated these pointless sacrifices, spurring children on to fresh acts of futility: one Shanghai teenager was lauded as a martyr for drowning as he tried to save wooden poles from a flood. A poster shows him amid the waves, head high and arm raised as he shouts a final exhortation to watching comrades. Looking back, the educated youth group spoke of the era as veterans might talk of a war to younger men born too late to fight: with regret and sometimes scorn or anger, and disbelief that they had gone through it, but also with an unmistakable tinge of superiority. It had made them braver, stronger, more capable. They understood something no one else could, that no one ever would again.
One of Auntie Gu’s classmates seduced a married man who was labouring alongside them, knowing that his long years in the army would allow him to settle in the city. He won permission to divorce his wife and then married the younger woman, leaving the countryside with her. “Then, not long after that, all the educated youth could go back. So she regretted it,” recalled Auntie Gu. Auntie Huang had faced a dilemma of her own. Marriage in the villages drastically reduced your odds of finding a route home, but she and her prospective husband concluded they had little to lose – neither had the kind of worker, peasant or soldier credentials needed to get out anyway. They wed in the early 1970s, and their son arrived soon after. When her home town needed workers a year or so later, she and her son had to go alone. It would be four more years before her husband could join them.
At first there were few ways to return to the cities. Solidarity fractured as youths competed for rare chances to escape, such as jobs and university places. Bribes to an official or slandering a rival offered better odds than diligence alone. Girls were pressured to pay for their route home with sex. Some were so desperate they injured themselves, hoping they would be allowed to go back on health grounds. From 1975, the rate of returns picked up, though more than two million teenagers arrived in the countryside that year. Desperation slowly coalesced into mass resistance and, by 1978, open protest: educated youth began striking, demonstrating, writing pamphlets and occupying premises, demanding to go home. Their experience had toughened them – they knew they had to fight to get anywhere. Two years later, officials axed the rustication scheme, leaving almost a million mired in the countryside, defeated by their circumstances. “It wasn’t easy when we came back, to fight our way back into city life,” said Auntie Huang. “We were not so young any more. We hadn’t had much education. Some of us had family and had to feed them at the same time as trying to learn the skills, working skills, to survive.”
They had suffered in the countryside for years; now they found they had little to offer the cities. They had lost not only their sense of purpose but their opportunities. Younger, more polished potential employees were emerging from schools. Some returnees took up low-skilled labour. Others resorted to sex work and crime. Others found that the hardship had fired them up. They became entrepreneurs, seizing upon economic reforms propelled in part by the authorities’ need to do something with them.
“It’s only because the decades have passed that we think about the good things when we recall it. At the time it was all very painful,” said Auntie Huang. “Life was so miserable – words cannot describe it. A lot of people can’t even tell others how miserable their experiences were. But people feel they need to pass on the spirit.” It had meaning to them, then? It wasn’t, as some thought, just a waste of their best years, time stolen from them? She seized the question. “I can’t decide. It was time wasted. But when I remember, it was like a treasury for me in some ways. I can’t say I don’t regret the experience. But I can’t say I’m ungrateful either. It’s something you can’t do anything about.” She thought for a moment more and brightened: “The best part was that we went through so many hardships when we were young that hardships we met later seemed like nothing.” It was her smile that undid me.
This is an edited extract from Red Memory: Living, Remembering and Forgetting China’s Cultural Revolution by Tania Branigan, published by Faber at £20 © Faber 2023
“In parts, the Cultural Revolution looks similar to the terrible genocides of the 20th century – though in China people killed their own kind”