Qian Liqun, "We Need the Village"

Qian Liqun, “We Need the Village, and the Village Needs Us.”[1]
 
Introduction and translation by Dayton Lekner[2] 
 
Introduction:  Outward Bound, Inward Turn
  
This is a short talk given by Qian Liqun 錢理群 (b. 1939) at Beijing Normal University in 2004. Qian was Professor of Chinese literature at Peking University until his retirement in 2002. He remains an active and leading proponent of May Fourth humanism in post-Mao literary and cultural criticism. His key areas of research are modern Chinese literature, with a focus on Lu Xun—whose enduring relevance he continues to advocate—and the plight of the intellectual in 20th century China. Particularly influential in the academic community have been his efforts toward a summation of, and reflection upon, the 20th century Chinese experience.
 
In his talk, Qian addresses a group of students who have just returned from a voluntary summer rural education program in Gansu, Ningxia, Anhui, and Sichuan. The program, known as the “Western Sunshine Operation 西部陽光行動”, sent groups of students to China’s “poorer Western regions” each summer, to carry out a mixture of prescribed and optional tasks toward the development of rural areas.[3] Their activities included making up for teacher shortages, encouraging local cultural practices, and building libraries.
 
Translated here is the first half of Qian’s talk, in which he gives a brief history of the Chinese intellectual’s century-long relationship with the countryside, connecting the students’ 2004 “operation” with movements that had come before. In the second half (which may follow in the future as a conclusion to this cliffhanger), Qian goes on to ruminate on the current (2004) rural education movement, and to stress its benefits for the students as well as for those they are helping. I was already mid translation of this first half when I read the essays by Qin Hui and Xiang Biao posted on this site last month, and I thought Qian’s reflections would make a nice companion to these for several reasons. 
 
What struck me first was that while Qin Hui gives us his personal experience of going down to the countryside, and Xiang Biao provides an analysis of the impact of the “sent down youth” on the social sciences, Qian Liqun instead takes us back to the first blush of the Chinese thinker’s connection with the Chinese farmer, and then proceeds to connect five generations of urban elite and their successive waves of rural interventions. That for young urban workers today the renewed pull of the countryside has turned into a new “to the countryside” movement means that this history is far from over, and Qian’s take on it remains valuable. 
 
To give a quick summary, Qian begins with the May Fourth realization that rural lives matter. We move from Lu Xun’s confession that he had viewed the residents of the countryside as like “birds and flowers” (in harmony and to be appreciated aesthetically from a distance) to Li Dazhao’s insistence that self-realization of the Chinese rural population was the only path to self-realization of the nation. In the 1930s the “to the village, to the people” movements moved from theory to practice, but still found competing and diverging approaches.

The CCP and Mao believed in the necessity of a structural and economic revolution in the countryside, while those identified with Yan Yangchu (James Yen) and Liang Shuming, sought a gradual transformation through education and technical innovation. The 1930s and 1940s saw the birth of the rural soviets with Jiangxi at their centre, and under the CCP a shift from a concern with mutual “enlightenment” of rural and intellectual to one of mutual education and often violent transformation.[4] 
 
The rural movements of both the Nationalists and the Communists collectively laid the foundations for Qian Liqun’s own experience in the countryside. He spent 18 years (1960-78) in a small village in Guizhou, which he refers to as his second “spiritual base 精神基礎” outside of Peking University. We then get the briefest history of the “educated youth” that Qin Hui and Xiang Biao are writing about—a movement that Qian Liqun argues was driven by ideals as well as expedience, and in which emotions as well as thoughts were radically transformed. Finally, he echoes both Qin and Xiang on the centrality and great consequence of this hundred year flirtation between the intellectual and the agrarian. Throughout, he emphasizes the successive movements as driven by urges to transform both the nation and the self. 
 
This is all useful, and Qian is his usual charming self, but you could get most of the above from Wikipedia, so why read this? Part of the reason is that Qian’s chummy style is deceptively difficult to translate without making his clean prose seem simply prosaic. But the other reason is the nature of the terms I have struggled with. The first have to do with the countryside itself. For all of Qian’s talk about getting to know the “real China” through the rural village, he gives us very little detail on that village. Instead, echoing Mao, he refers to it as a “vast realm,” or a place of “fresh and clean life.” He points out Li Dazhao’s romanticism in describing the village as both “darkest in the extreme” and a void out of which China’s own transformation could be realized.

Yet Qian himself has not moved so far from Li Dazhao in thinking and writing about a countryside that is more a field of feelings and possibilities than one of soil and grass. Qian Liqun’s 18 years in the countryside and his power with words endow him with the capability to write in detail on the matter, so I can only assume that he chooses to cultivate this image of a bucolic world defined by its opposition to the urban and the urbane. That is, in some tension with his analytic role as an academic, Qian Liqun wants to preserve the ambiguous and romantic image of the rural. Why? 
 
This brings us to the other cluster of terms that were hard to translate: those to do with internal or emotional states, of the intellectuals and students Qian is writing about, and his own. Qian points to this inner world from the outset. His field, he tells us, is something called jingshen shi 精神史, which loosely translates as “spiritual history,” or we could equate with the French histoire des mentalités or the German Geistesgeschichte, but is this what Qian means?

He goes on to discuss the emotions of the students he is addressing, just returned from their own experience in the countryside, before looping back: to Lu Xun and Li Dazhao’s passion for the countryside; to Mao’s “call of the heart” to mobilize intellectuals to unite with the rural population; to the Chinese village as spiritual icon of the homeland for those displaced during the War of Resistance with Japan; to the urge for self-transformation and realization that underpinned the Yan’an years; and to what Qian calls his own “connection of the flesh” that was sutured in the sixties and seventies. 
 
Phrases like “spiritual base” and “call of the heart” resist being pinned down and I am sure would be rendered differently by other translators or in translation into different languages. And I am slowly learning that when a cluster of terms within an essay are hard to translate, this means that the writer is himself grappling with something. So it seems that the ambiguity in describing the inner world of the intellectual is just as valuable to Qian as it is in describing the countryside to which they went, in enormous numbers, over generations and across the 1949 divide.

Elsewhere, Qian has suggested that the key struggle for the individual during the 20th century was one of space, of finding room to move and to think. Here Qian finds such space in two domains – the vast world outside the city, and the vast world inside the human. These play off against each other in Qian’s essay, and become mirrored points of focus and sources of energy. 
 
Others have pointed to continuity and change across the 20th century relationship between intellectual, state, and rural in methods, theories, and practice.[5] Qian sees them in the inner world of the successive waves of those individuals involved. In doing so he points out to us the structuring power of sentiment. This is what connects him to his audience of young students, to his village (and spiritual base) in Guizhou, to Lu Xun, to Li Dazhao, to Liang Shuming, and to Mao Zedong.

Historians continue to notice that the CCP were not alone in their forays into the village, presenting the endeavours by Yan Yangchu and Liang Shuming as alternative rural moderns. In Qian Liqun’s sentimental exploration, it is the connections rather than the divisions or alternatives that come to the fore. By looking past the battle between KMT and CCP and across the 1949 divide, Qian also paves the way for China’s century of agrarian dreams to be connected with those of other regions and nations. 
 
And Qian Liqun is not alone in his inward turn. In a recent conversation for a different project, the prominent historian and sociologist Ying Xing (应星, Tsinghua University, Beijing), referred to a new subfield of revolutionary history called xinling shi 心靈史 again loosely, “a history of souls” that is being pioneered by the professor Huang Daoxuan (黄道炫, Peking University). Huang and others, such as Li Zhiyu (李志毓, CASS) are leading an interior turn in histories of the People’s Republic that return the feelings of the individual, previously written off as bourgeois, to the center of historical narrative and structure.

Huang and his followers, like Qian Liqun here, are asking not only what the Chinese people did for their nation, but what their nation did to them. In this new approach, movements 運動 occur both within a society, and within the individual. How these parallel and interactive movements relate is a question only now coming into focus. It is still a revolution, but once more, with feeling. 
 
Translation 
 
So, this is the second time we are meeting. Back on September 20, I attended the closing and summary meeting of your summer “down to the countryside” experience. I heard so many wonderful speeches, and was stirred up and had many reflections of my own. But that day during the meetings I could only say a few words. I wanted instead to write an essay—but my desk filled up, and I shelved it. Now I have to thank the students at Beijing Normal University for your invitation, giving me another chance to talk to you all, and say what I didn’t manage to say on that day.
 
Maybe because I study modern literary history and the spiritual history 精神史 of intellectuals in modern China, I feel a sort of professional sense of history. When I see you all, I am struck by a feeling of déjà vu. I have a sense that we’ve met somewhere before in the course of my research—your words, your tone, the mixture of passion and confusion your eyes reveal, your joy and your distress. That delight of first arrival in the countryside; the embarrassment on first entering the house of a farmer and not knowing what to say; the anxiety about whether you can really work here; the endless debate, followed by the lingering reflection and self-doubt. In 20th century Chinese history, and in the spiritual history of the Chinese intellectual, all of these have appeared before, and indeed, among them lurks my own figure.
 
In this history there exists a lineage that runs from generation to generation, a movement that has persisted for the whole century and is known by its call: “intellectuals, young students, go down to the countryside, go down among the people!” Maybe you haven’t noticed, but your “Western Sunshine Operation” is in reality one link in a great historical chain, a new chapter, in which you walk a road established by earlier generations—and you yourselves are also in the process of writing and making a new history.
 
So, let’s have a little review of this history. Perhaps it’s best we begin with May Fourth, as it is one source from which the modern intellectual draws their spirit. As we well know, the central concept of the May 4th New Culture Movement was the “awakening and liberation of humanity.” What I would like to add is that an important aspect of this awakening and liberation was the discovery and affirmation of the independent value of women, children and the rural population. These three kinds of people all sat at the bottom layer of the social structure, their existence overlooked in traditional Chinese culture. The great discovery of these three groups in itself is ample evidence of the May Fourth New Culture Movement’s democratic and humanistic nature, and its extraordinary significance.

The “discovery” of women and children is a topic of great interest, one that we may have a chance to discuss later in detail. What I would like to talk about today is “the discovery of the peasantry.” Lu Xun once recalled:
“I grew up in a big urban family, from a young age receiving my lessons from the classics and my masters, so I saw the toiling masses like the birds and flowers. From time to time when I saw the hypocrisy and corruption of upper-class society, I envied their (the peasants’) peace and happiness. But my maternal grandmother’s family came from a village, which gave me the chance to meet a great many farmers and gradually come to see that they suffered terrible oppression for their entire lives and met with many difficulties, and were not at all like the birds and flowers.”

At the very least this shows that the pioneers of the May Fourth realized that the peasantry, this lower stratum of the people, were not simply aesthetically pleasing “flowers and grass” for the people to trample upon, but had a value in and of themselves, were independent “people” with their own demands, and thus should be able to enjoy their own happiness, have the right to speak their own voice, and defend their own independent interests. 
 
Another group of thinkers connected the liberation of the peasantry with the liberation and development of the entire nation. Li Dazhao (李大釗 1889-1927), in his 1919 “Youth and the Village 青年與農村,”  pointed out that:

“Our China is a peasant nation; the great majority of laboring classes are made up of these peasants. If they are not liberated, then our people as a whole are not liberated; their suffering is the suffering of our people as a whole; their ignorance is the ignorance of the people as a whole; their goods and their ills are the goods and ills of our entire political body.”

He further claimed that “if we want this new and modern civilization to permeate society, we absolutely must unite the intellectual and the laboring classes as one.” Therefore, he introduced the slogan “we young people should go to the villages.”
 
Particularly interesting is that Li Dazhao spoke of three reasons for this movement. The first was that “the darkness of the Chinese village is extreme.” More concretely he laid out many aspects—you can see that he did some investigation—and as we read his work today, we can still see that it rings true, a sad indictment. But today we won’t talk about this, but focus instead on his conclusion. He argued that:

“The average intellectual spends his youth running about the city, chasing knowledge that is only half-complete, his only goal is to live in the city and he is  unwilling to return to the fields; he focuses on earning a living in the bureaucracy, and is also unwilling to labor. As time goes by, these youths who muddle 鬼混 about the city all become treacherous spirits 鬼蜮. You will see no trace of the intellectual class in the villages, which have become a hell. Is that this fresh and clean life in the countryside has fallen into this kind of hell not the responsibility of us lazy youth?” 
 
The second reason that Li Dazhao spoke of is even more worthy of our attention. He pointed out that everyone was talking about instituting “democratic politics” and “establishing a constitution;” but we cannot forget that the Chinese voters “are in the vast majority to be found in the village.” If the village is not opened up, then the peasants will not awaken and will remain without the freedom judge for themselves Even if universal suffrage is established, then those urban hoodlums “who practice all kinds of trickery and deception,” those urban bandits “who have accumulated heaps of dirty money,” will come and deceive the “village elders of their old hometowns.” And if these people are elected, is there even the slightest hope for “constitutional politics” or “democratic politics?”
 
For this reason, Li Dazhao proclaimed:

“To youth seeking the establishment of a constitution! If your goal is constitutional politics, then you must first obtain a constitutional common people 民間. If you seek to obtain a constitutional people, then you must first bring light to the villages, to transform the authoritarian village into a constitutional village.  It is only this kind of democracy that can be said to truly have a foundation and a fountainhead. It is only this kind of village that can be said to cultivate the fertile soil of democracy. Only in this kind of movement can the youth be said to be laborers who transplant the seeds of democracy.”
 
You see how well Li Dazhao puts it. I feel as if he is simply here in conversation with us, talking about problems that China was facing at the time, or was about to face . I’m not sure how those students here today feel about his?
 
So, let’s look at his third reason. Li says, at present many young people spend their days drifting about the city, unable to find their way in life, while “in the villages, there is the space – and even the need – for youth activity, but not even the shadow of actual young people.” In Li Dazhao’s view, this is a kind of self-neglect 自誤.   Hence his appeal:

“To my young friends who drift about the city! You should know that there is much evil in the city, and much happiness in the country; life in the city is the life of a ghost, the activity of the countryside is the activity of people; the city’s air is foul, the country’s air is pure. Why don’t you hurriedly pack your things, settle up your debts and return to your native soil?”

These words of Li Dazhao are perhaps quite different from everyone’s impressions, because many young people see the city as a place of great room for development, that calls to their yearnings; but the overcrowding of the cities is something that will sooner or later take place. Even more importantly, Li Dazhao here clearly idealizes the countryside, while he had earlier on discussed the “darkness of the village.”

In fact, his intentional embellishment of the countryside stems from an antipathy towards the culture of the city, and at the same time is influenced by the Russian Narodniks. From the very outset, Li Dazhao’s “Youth and the Village” speaks of the Narodniks’ “to the people”  movement, in which “young patriots” “abandoned their happy home lives, were unafraid to trudge through misery, and all went down to the village to disseminate the principles of humanism and socialism.” The Russian Narodniks had a positive influence on China’s own “to the people” movement, but this influence also had a negative aspect, in that it idealized both the village and the peasant, which we will discuss below.
 
Li Dazhao’s idealizing of the village and the peasant also reflects another characteristic of May Fourth era thinking, what is known as the “New Village Movement 新村運動.” The New Village Movement was an experiment in the establishment of a utopian ideal society and life. A group of idealists would gather together to create a “new village,” establishing communal property on the principle of, “ “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs,” living a new life combining communal reading and discussion with engagement in agriculture and handicrafts.

​In about 1918, the famous Japanese author and intellectual Saneatsu Mushanokōji 小岛实笃 (1885-1976) established a kind of “new village” like this in Kyushu. In 1919, after Lu Xun’s younger brother Zhou Zuoren 周作人 (1885-1967) visited the village, he became a zealous agitator for this style of village and won the support of the pioneers of the May Fourth New Culture movement, including Li Dazhao, and many young students. He also established a “work-study mutual aid team 工讀互助團” similar to the “New Villages” in Beijing.

Mao Zedong was also an ardent supporter of the “New Village movement,” interviewed Zhou Zuoren especially about this, and even wrote the draft for a book about the establishment of New Villages. But the central ideal of the New Village Movement, in Zhou Zuoren’s words, was the realization of a robust “human life.” This robust human life would be forged through the unity of the individual with society and with humanity; the unification of material and spiritual life; and the unification of intellectual and physical labor—the coordination between people, and the harmonization of humans and nature. It was precisely in the glow of this idealistic light, that the peasant’s life, immersed in nature with his “rising at sunrise and resting at sunset, tilling the soil for food, digging a well for water” held such a special attraction for Li Dazhao’s generation and the youth, who were so enamoured with utopian socialism.
 
However, during the May Fourth era the intellectuals’ “to the village, to the people” remained restricted to theoretical advocacy and small-scale experimentation; it did not become a genuine movement. The real dramatic expansion of the “to the countryside, to the people” movement was during the 1930s. If we say that the May Fourth was limited in scope to the intellectual and the cultural realms, by the 1930s we can see an expansion to a social movement.

After the failure of the great revolution, and following a deepening of understanding of Chinese society, an increasing number of intellectuals turned their gaze to the village, realizing that this is where the real fundamental transformation of China must begin. But a great divergence of opinion emerged as to how to bring about a transformation of the village, and there formed two different ideological paths. Which is to say, both were “to the countryside, and to the people,” but each took a different path to this countryside.
 
One such path was that of the Communist Party, with Mao Zedong as representative. These people believed that the problems facing China were at root problems of a social system, that it was necessary to first seize power through revolution, fundamentally transforming the half-feudal, half-colonial social system, only after which could new construction be carried out. Further, this school saw the problem of China's villages as a problem with the land system, that the transformation of the village must begin with land-reform, with an overturning of the status of a minority of landlords controlling large areas of land, and a majority of farmers having little or no land themselves.

Ultimately, China's revolution needed to take China's innumerable villages as its base of operations, and take the transformation of China's village as the foundation for the transformation of China as a whole. It was this way of thinking that led the CCP to launch their "Soviet Movement" in Jiangxi, Fujian, Hunan, Hubei, and other areas in the South, in which great numbers of revolutionary intellectuals went to the countryside to foment revolution and establish base areas. What emerged was what Mao Zedong described in a poem as the revolutionary scene of "reclaiming part of the golden bowl, as land is shared out by will.”[6]

At the same time as this, another group of intellectuals, represented by Yan Yangchu (晏陽初James Yen 1890-1990) and Liang Shuming (梁漱溟 1893-1988), were working to carry out their "Village Reconstruction Movement." Yan Yangchu believed that the fundamental problem of China's village could be summed up in four words: "ignorant, poor, weak, and selfish." The answer, therefore, was to carry out education in these four areas. The first was "literature and art education," in which experimental public schools and arts schools would be established to eliminate illiteracy among youth. The next step would be to organize the students in the common schools into student's associations, thus transforming the outstanding village youth into key actors in rural reconstruction.
 
The second was "Livelihood education," aiming to spread agricultural science and develop agricultural production. For the rural economy, they would help villagers organize cooperatives and self-help societies, and at the same time, they would devote attention to the development of agricultural industry. The third was "Sanitary Education," in which the focus would be on the establishment of a village healthcare system, "allowing the peasants, under their economic situation, to attain the opportunity for scientific medical treatment, and upholding minimum standards of health." The fourth was "civic education," in which household-style education would be applied to all members of the household to carry out training in civic virtue," to "instil in them a public-mindedness and the power to unite, as well as a minimum of common civic knowledge and political morality in order to establish a foundation for local self-governance."
 
Yan Yangchu emphasized that the core of these four pillars of education was the cultivation in villagers of the power to think, produce, maintain their health, and unite together. In the final analysis, this was the education and the transformation of the person, and this "carrying out of the educational work of 'human transformation'" was what Yan saw as the crux of the solution to the problems facing Chinese society as a whole. In order to realize these ideas, he championed the slogan of "scholars to the countryside" and led a group of young people to Hebei and other areas to conduct nearly ten years of experiments in rural transformation.
 
Liang Shuming was also a key proponent of the rural reconstruction movement. But rather than seeing the problem of China's villages in the concrete issues of ignorance, poverty, weakness, and selfishness, Liang believed that one needed to grasp the underlying factors and concentrate on finding a solution for China as a whole. The crux of the national problem, thought Liang, was to begin with a foundation of China's existing culture, absorb advanced technology from the West, and establish a new culture for the nation. Applying this approach to rural reconstruction, Liang advocated establishing new customs for China based upon the traditional community compacts 鄉約,[7] and in rural areas setting up village and rural schools on a large scale which would become not only a mechanism for local education but would serve as the foundation for basic rural political organization and grassroots collectivism, to organize the peasantry.

At the same time, they would establish production, marketing, and transport cooperatives, as well as agricultural banks and other productive and financial organizations, promoting improvement in rural technology, with an eye toward pursuing the path of agriculture leading industry. Liang Shuming also lead a group of intellectuals and young people in establishing the Shandong Rural Reconstruction Research Institute 山東鄉村建設研究院 as well as experimental zones in Zouping 鄒平, Heze 菏澤,  and Jining 濟寧 counties.
 
In the 1930s, development of the rural reconstruction movement flourished. According to statistics of the Department of Industry of the KMT government, the number of organizations involved in the rural construction movement was more than six hundred, with the number of experimental locations and zones surpassing one thousand. These experiments all subsequently came to an end with the outbreak of the War of Resistance with Japan, and the occupation of the experimental areas by the invading Japanese forces.
 
In the 1940s, during the forced exile of the whole nation, large numbers of intellectuals made their way from the cities to China’s peripheral areas, and through this real contact deepened their understanding of the importance of the Chinese village. In fact, to a certain extent, the War of Resistance with Japan was a war of national liberation that took the peasant as its primary subject. As Mao Zedong said: “It is the peasants who are the source of the Chinese army.

The soldiers are peasants in military uniform,”[8] and from this observation, Mao drew a series of conclusions: “It is the peasants who are the main political force for democracy in China at the present stage. Chinese democrats will achieve nothing unless they can rely on the support of the 360 million peasants;” “it is the peasants who are the chief concern of China's cultural movement at the present stage. If the 360 million peasants are left out, are not the ‘elimination of illiteracy,’ ‘popularization of education,’ ‘literature and art for the masses’ and ‘public health’ just empty talk?”[9]
 
What is worth noting, is that when Mao Zedong further alerted “China's many intellectuals to the necessity of becoming one with the peasants,”[10] and even suggested that “the intellectuals will accomplish nothing if they fail to integrate themselves with the workers and peasants,”[11] he was met with fervent agreement from the intellectuals themselves. People felt  that this seemed to be a call for their generation that was impossible to ignore.

At the same time it was a request from the heart that had evolved out of a personal experience of struggle. From the harsh realities of war, people tend to develop a sense of solitude, and intellectuals are particularly susceptible to a feeling of powerlessness, and at such times yearn for home to return to. This land of China, and the ordinary peasants upon it, naturally became a refuge for intellectuals who were in a state of dual exile (both lived and spiritual). It was thus that a great number of intellectuals poured into the base area with Yan’an at its center, into the villages, to form an even larger scale intellectual “down to the countryside” movement.
 
This movement naturally had a deep connection with the “down to the people 到民間去”  movement of the 1920s and 1930s, but also had its differences: apart from the fact that it was led and launched by the CCP, and was thus an action of government (the Yan’an area border government of the time can be seen as an embryonic form of the People’s Republic of China), the most significant is that a subtle shift occurred in the relationship between intellectuals and peasants. To “enlighten and be enlightened” gradually transformed into “to be taught and to teach,” and the theme of “enlightenment” from “down to the people” gradually transformed into one of “transformation.”

This is especially true when Mao Zedong, in essays such as “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art,” pushed the theme of transformation to an extreme, proclaiming that “compared with the workers and peasants, the unremoulded intellectuals were not clean and that, in the last analysis, the workers and peasants were the cleanest people and, even though their hands were soiled and their feet smeared with cow-dung, they were really cleaner than the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois intellectuals.”[12]

This takes the populist tendency to aestheticize both peasants and rural villages mentioned above to new heights. And when Mao went even further and demanded that “intellectuals transform themselves into peasants,” and insisted that “the transformation must be complete,” what this really meant was that peasant consciousness was to be used to transform the intellectuals, and even the entirety of China’s thought, culture and society, thus planting a great hidden danger that was to manifest itself later on.

However, in the base areas in the 1940s, although there were some deviations in guiding ideology, the primary impact of the “down to the countryside movement” at the time was still positive. In going to the countryside, intellectuals deepened their understanding of Chinese peasants, villages, and the characteristics of the whole nation. Their thoughts and emotions also underwent a transformation.

At the same time, they also greatly promoted the development of rural reconstruction.  In border areas, the 1942-1945 launching of the mass education movement, rent reduction movement, mutual aid and cooperative movement, mass production movement, and democratic election movement, and all worked together to transform the politics, economy, culture, education and health of the border regions.

In the second half of the 1940s, the launching of a large-scale land reform movement in fact established the foundations for the later seizure of power and the establishment of the new China. We could go so far as to say that without the 1940s rural transformation and success in reconstruction led by the Communist Party, which obtained widespread support from the peasants, there would have been no new China.
 
The national system of the new China established after 1949 took the working class as its leader, and the alliance of workers and peasants as its foundation. For this reason, many national policies on education, culture, health, were oriented toward rural areas. This in turn brought about the comprehensive development of Chinese rural reconstruction of the 1950s and 1960s—this is plain to see. Of course, the “Great Leap Forward” and “People’s Commune” movements of the same period, based on Mao Zedong’s utopian social ideals (a development from the previously discussed May Fourth ideal of the “new village movement”) also did enormous harm to the rural population, a topic that must be discussed separately.
 
Here I must say a little about the choices that I made, as an intellectual coming of age in the 1950s and 1960s. I shared with my generation an intense and passionate idealism. On the one hand lay a great desire to rebuild the motherland, on the other lay an elevated sense of self-transformation. It was these two great passions that led to the highest ambitions of our youth: to head to the place where our motherland needed us most, the place of greatest hardship, and to offer up our own youth. So for us, the countryside was always a vast realm in which we could both contribute the most and transform ourselves. Of course, it is undeniable that behind this lay another idea, that “where the Party points, we go,” which also reveals a fundamental weakness of our generation:  that consciously or unconsciously, we were the “willing tool” of the Party.
 
Thus on graduation, when the organization (the “organization” was a popular concept at the time) assigned me to a remote mountain area of Guizhou, although this was somewhat punitive (because my “family background” was not good, and I myself had taken the “apolitical road of professionalism”[13]), I still went gladly because this was what the Party had arranged. My thought at the time was that “a real man should should make his mark in the world.”
 
In the end, I was not sent down to the lowest strata of rural society, and instead began teaching in the sub-provincial administrative region of Anshu 安順. I ended up teaching there for 18 years, from the age of 21 to 39, giving up the best years of my life. But I have no regrets. It was because of this that I went through an era of great famine and the calamity of the Cultural Revolution at the lower levels of Chinese society. To exaggerate a little, I went through a great trial with the ordinary people at the bottom of society, and in the process, I came to truly and deeply understand Chinese society. It was this experience that for the most part decided the later development of my thought and scholarship. 
 
To tell the truth, my current concern with the intellectual “down to the people” movement, and my desire to discuss this movement, stems predominantly from these 18 years, in which I forged a connection of the flesh with the lowest strata of society. Although I left Guizhou in the late 1970s to resume my college entrance exams and ended up at an “elite school” like Peking University (PKU), Guizhou has remained all along another “spiritual base” outside of PKU, and I have consistently preserved an intimate association and spiritual connection with this base. Let me also add that I’ve heard that many of you have maintained a connection with the villages in which you spent your summer vacation, I think this is tremendously important. Whatever you do in the future, wherever you go, never give up this spiritual base.
 
Let’s turn to the Educated Youth 知識青年 during the Cultural Revolution, this is loosely speaking your parents’ generation. They responded to Mao’s call, and headed to the countryside partly of their own volition, and partly due to coercion. This became the “up to the mountains and down to the countryside” movement of the largest scale and with the most profound impact of the 20th century. Mao Zedong was quite clear: “The countryside is a vast realm, in which much can be accomplished,” “it is vital that educated youth go down to the village and be re-educated by the poor and lower-middle peasants.”

Why Mao Zedong wanted an “up to the mountain, down to the countryside” movement of such a scale is a question that must be carefully researched. In my view, his motives were complicated. Apart from the pragmatic considerations of the political crises and employment problems accumulated through the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s own utopian ideals, echoes of the New Village Movement were perhaps also in play. (At the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution, Mao said that he wanted to turn the whole nation into one “great school”—that all people should learn to work, learn to farm, learn to fight, and attack the bourgeoisie).

In any event, the guiding thought of this movement displayed a clear tendency toward anti-intellectualism (Mao stressed more than once that “the more books you read, the more stupid you become,” which is why you had to accept “re-education by poor and middle peasants), and anti-intellectualism is surely one of the major problems with populism.  For this reason, I absolutely do not propose idealizing or glorifying this movement.
 
There is one fact that cannot be ignored, which is the intellectual and emotional transformation that occurred when the educated youth left the cities for the countryside. I remember that in a previous essay, I quoted an educated youth of the time, who said that they “did not know what China was, or how much the common people suffered and how good they were” until they went to the countryside.  For me, these two “did not know until” are no small matters, whether it is for the educated youth themselves, or for the future development of China, both are extremely important. 

Thus, in the later period of the Cultural Revolution, the appearance among many educated youth of what scholars later called “grassroots thought tribes 民間思想村落,” is no accident of history: on the one hand was the suspicion, following the Lin Biao incident, of intellectual and cultural views that had been inculcated in the people over a long period; on the other was a renewed attention to the “Chinese problem 中國問題,” following a deep experience of the countryside, forcing this generation to “rethink, and re-evaluate everything,” including fundamental questions such as “whither China 中國向何處去?”
 
Such reflections in turn became the foundation and prepared the talent for the “intellectual liberation movement 思想解放運動” and the Reform and Opening that followed the end of the Cultural Revolution.  Many leaders of today’s Chinese political, economic, intellectual, cultural, and academic circles have backgrounds as “educated youth” or  the experience of going down to the countryside to be re-educated. This is a phenomenon of great importance. Each gleaned their own divergent lessons from time in the countryside, with great influence for their thought and actions up to today. Naturally each in turn influenced to varying degrees the present reality that is China, as well as its future.

​At the same time, when such a great number of “educated youth” flowed into China’s remote rural areas, they brought about a transformation of the countryside, promoting rural construction to varying degrees. Later such rural transformation achieved a certain uniformity. As I understand it, after the end of the Cultural Revolution, among promoters of the transformation of China that began in the countryside, were the “educated youth” of this era. Thus, to a certain degree, we could say that the great waves of “educated youth” that went to the countryside, brought about a direct and lasting influence on the transformation of China of the last twenty years of the 20th century, and up until today.
 
Notes

[1] 钱理群, “我们需要农村，农村需要我们,” 《二十六篇：和青年朋友談心》, (東方出版中心, 2016), published online on September 9, 2017, at https://www.sohu.com/a/190954010_653202.

[2] Dayton Lekner is an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the University of Freiburg.  Please address comments to him at daytonlekner@gmail.com.

[3] This program continues (in 2021) to be run each year by the 21st Century Education Research Institute 21世纪教育发展研究. Readers will note that Qian Liqun emphasizes two-way learning between urban intellectuals and rural workers, Western Sunshine Operation however thus far emphasizes primarily education of the rural by the urban. For a brief description, see here: http://www.chinadevelopmentbrief.org.cn/news-13772.html. 

[4] For an in depth look at this tussle between KMT and CCP vision for the countryside, see Kate Merkel-Hess, The Rural Modern: Reconstructing the Self and State in Republican China. (University of Chicago Press, 2016); also Steven Averill, Joseph Esherick, and Elizabeth Perry, eds., Revolution in the Highlands: China’s Jinggangshan Base Area (Rowman and Littlefield, 2006).

[5] This shared concern of the CCP and other independent actors was noted by Guy Alitto in 1979 in his biography of Liang Shuming and more recently Merkel-Hess has explored these other “rural moderns.”

[6] A quote from Mao Zedong’s 1929 poem “The Warlords Clash”—the original line is “收拾金甌一片, 分田分地真忙.” For the full poem, see https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/poems/poems04.htm.

[7] Community compacts were locally agreed and shared rules and regulations by which, since the Ming Dynasty, people living in the same village or township dealt with problems and conflict and assisted one another.

[8] Mao Zedong, “On Coalition Government,” April 24, 1945. English translation available at:
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-3/mswv3_25.htm.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid. Translation adapted from the above.

[11] Mao Zedong, “The May Fourth Movement,” May 1939, translation adapted from:
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-2/mswv2_13.htm. 

[12] Mao Zedong, “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art,” available online at https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-3/mswv3_08.htm.  In other, shorter, versions of Qian’s text that are also available on the web, this and certain other quotes from Mao have been omitted.  This is a fairly frequent occurrence in China, and reflects different levels of editorial sensitivity in particular journals and websites, as well as changes in propaganda work. 

[13] Translator’s note:  Literally, the “white professional road” suggesting an apolitical stance where Qian would have been “more expert than red.”