Mao's hijacked generation - youfen wang

Maos Hijacked Generation.

Sarasota, FL: New Knowledge Press, 2024 According to Ai Weiwei, the renowned Chinese artist and human rights activist, [t]his rare book is a true record of the dark history.

of the Zhiqing Movement in China that destroyed rationality, severed peoples historical memory and rational thinking, and deeply affected the way Chinese people think and behave today.

During a span of seventeen years (1962 to 1979), close to eighteen million Chinese educated youth, about one-half of an entire generation of literate teenagers from Chinas cities, weresent off to remote places in the Chinese countryside, sometimes for a decade or more, to be re-educated, and to learn from the peasants.

Those young people are known in China as zhiqing, literally, educated youth, because of their origins as literate middle school graduates from Chinese cities, and also known as Sent-Down Youth, in English.

The zhiqing experience shaped the lives and consciousness of an entire generation of Chinese, including Chinas president, Xi Jinping, among other current members of Chinas Politburo.

The zhiqing program was undoubtedly the largest compulsory population shift in human history, which was carried out mainly to fulfill an ideological obsession of Mao Zedong.

This book includes personal accounts of zhiqing departure, arrival, and return, idealistic enthusiasm and abject disillusionment, tales of life, work, broken families, love and hate set in diverse rural locales, from jungle villages in Chinas Southeast to grassland outposts in Mongolia, from the banks of the Yellow River to the caves of Yanan in Chinas Northeast.

The stories narrate experiences of rape, famine, suicide, madness, true and false heroes, career de- railment and career creation, ideological idealism, and ideological cynicism, among others.

This book is organized into three main parts.

First is a Preface by Wang Youfen and a Foreword by Professor Michel Bonnin, the leading historian of the zhiqing program and experience.

The second part is Wang Youfens translations of the forty-two first-hand accounts of zhiqing experience, edited by him and Robin Radin and organized under five topic headings, including Life and Work; Relationships with Local People; Love, Marriage, and Family;The Go-Home Campaign and Afterwards; and Confessions and Reflections.

Third, an historical background essay by Wang Youfen, entitled Chinas Sent-Down Youth: Two Perspectives,.