Qin Hui on Sent-Down Youth

Qin Hui, “The ‘Fate of the People and Personal Mission’ in the Rustification Movement”[1]
 
Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Introduction
　　
Qin Hui (b. 1953) is one of China’s best known liberal historians and establishment intellectuals, and taught at Tsinghua University until his recent retirement.  Translations of several of his texts appear on this site (click here and scroll down to find him), and biographical details are available here (a long and revealing interview) as well as  here (a more concise sketch). 
 
At the title suggests, the text translated here has to do with Qin’s thoughts about China’s rustification movement, which sent some 20 million Chinese young people “up to the mountains and down to the villages” (上山下乡, another name for the movement) during of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), for reasons both ideological (urban youths needed to “make revolution” together with the poor peasants) and practical (the Cultural Revolution reduced many Chinese cities to chaos, there were few jobs for high school graduates and universities were closed, so restless Red Guards needed to be somewhere other than in China’s cities).[2]  I decided to translate Qin’s text because the social anthropologist Xiang Biao (b. 1972) recently sent me his essay on “The End of the ‘Educated  Youth Era’ in Chinese Social Science,” and I ran across Qin’s while translating Xiang’s, and found that they complemented one another nicely, Xiang’s being theoretical and “meta,” while Qin’s is deeply personal.
 
Indeed, the basis of Qin’s essay is his having spent nine years—between the ages of 15 and 24, from 1969 to 1978—as a sent-down youth in a distant mountainous Zhuang (an ethnic minority group) village on the border between Qin’s native Guangxi and the neighboring province of Yunnan.  Qin was inspired to write his text—which appeared several years before that of Xiang Biao—by what he took to be the prevailing discourse concerning the rustification movement in the early 2010s, i.e., people either praised the lofty “idealism” of the sent-down youth, or lamented how hard the experience was, and what a waste of time it had all been.  As always, Qin seeks to go beyond “received wisdom” in search of more convincing perspectives, as well as to place the experience of the sent-down youth in broader historical and geographical contexts.
 
Qin’s text is long and interesting, but can be summed up fairly readily:  On the one hand, it makes little sense to talk about the “idealism” of the sent-down youth, because with very few exceptions, they were forced to go to the countryside (and in almost all cases, forced to stay, at least for a certain time).  Qin notes derisively that many well-connected youths played at being “the reddest of the red” for a couple of years and then managed to get themselves back to the cities, where they could practice their idealism in more comfortable surroundings.  At the same time, many sent-down youth, including Qin himself, embraced, at least in part, the ideological idealism of the movement, the idea that they were learning from the peasants—or perhaps contributing to the world revolution.  They did so in part out of conviction and in part out of necessity:  acting “as if” this ideology were true both fueled the “activism” they needed to display in their daily lives to avoid criticism and improve their situations, and sustained them psychologically when nothing else could.  Forced sincerity, Qin argues, becomes genuine sincerity under conditions of coercion and lack of choice.  Ideology was the “opium of the people” during this difficult period.
 
Qin argues that this is normal and even praiseworthy, unless “activism” involved hurting other people by embracing the “joy of struggle,” which was very often the case.  Although the sent-down youth could not hold a candle, in terms of faith, to the French missionaries Qin mentions who were “sent down,” of their own free will, in the nineteenth century, to the same distant villages where Qin and his cohort wound up,  China’s Zhiqing could still hold their heads high and be proud of their idealism and their endurance. 

At the same time, Qin argues that the ideology embraced during the Cultural Revolution was destined to fail.  He points to the use of forced labor (called “voluntary” at the time) in the former Soviet Union and especially in the case of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.  Ironically, Qin was in his village at the same time that the Khmer Rouge carried out their genocidal revolution between 1975 and 1979, and followed events in Indochina as best he could, celebrating the success of “world revolution.”  At the time, China and Cambodia claimed to be best of friends, but Qin later learned that, as part of ethnic cleansing, the Khmer Rouge set its vicious sites not only on the Chinese mercantile elite, settled in Cambodia for years, but also on local ethnic Chinese who were members of the CCP (many of whom were Vietnamese)—and that Chairman Mao and the CCP backed the Khmer Rouge rather than attempting to help the Chinese, many of whom were eventually killed. 

Even if Qin himself was one of the lucky survivors of the rustification movement—when he left his village after nine years he went directly to graduate school, eventually becoming a well-known scholar—it is hard to imagine anything more perverse than Qin, the idealistic youth in his mountain village, cheering on the success of the world revolution a few hundred kilometers to the south of him, while Chairman Mao and the CCP turned their back on Qin’s compatriots, leaving them in the bloody hands of Pol Pot for reasons of ideological affinity.  Even if idealism can sustain you in difficult moments, Qin argues, you ultimately have to look at its contents.
 
To avoid repetition, I sometimes employ certain Chinese expressions for key concepts.  Here is a brief lexicon:  Zhiqing 知青 (short for 知识青年), means “educated youth” or “sent-down youth.”  Chadui Zhiqing 插队知青 means “educated youth sent down to the villages.  Bingtuan Zhiqing 兵团知青 means “educated youth sent down to state/army-run farms.”
 
Although Qin’s text is now available on Aisixiang, my impression is that he may have originally published it on his WeChat feed and that he may well have included pictures of his time in the village.  Click here to see some of these images.   
 
Favorite Quotes              
 
Today people have two attitudes toward models of that period:  either they mock them, disliking their “extreme leftism,” or even believing that they were faking it in pursuit of fame or flattery, and they disdain them; or they praise this kind of “extreme leftism,”  even today lauding that “passionate age,” which was more noble than today when “people are not the same and the world is going to the dogs.”
 
As a Zhiqing who was not particularly “red,” but was nonetheless a “model” now and again, I would like to say a couple of impartial things about these attitudes:  we are all human, and react to certain things in certain ways.  If you try to improve your situation through “activism,” then as long as you don’t injure someone else (and this is very important!  Benefiting yourself by hurting others is wrong, or even a sin.  There was a lot of this kind of evil at that time), then were is nothing to criticize, just like today there is nothing to criticize if you get paid for doing your job or running your business.  And if this kind of behavior brings benefits to others, as when, for example, some Zhiqing barefoot doctors saved people’s lives, then not only is there nothing to criticize but much to be praised.  And if your unhappy situation was the result of being persecuted, and you are being “active” to get out of that unhappy situation, then this deserves empathy, not criticism. 
 
However, the problem is that solely using this kind of worldly motivation to explain things at the time is truly inadequate.  Because the situation at the time was different than getting paid for doing your work, because today if you don’t get paid for your work, you stop working.  Back then we had no other choice, and things were very unfair, in the sense that while of course there were cases where activism earned praise and improved your situation, but there were also cases where somebody was praised because of their “connections” and “background,” becoming the reddest of the red without even trying.  And it was even more frequent that your “behavior” made no difference at all, and people kept discriminating against you, leaving you struggling at the very bottom.  In this type of situation, what meaning does your “behavior” have from a worldly perspective?  Like my friend Chen Niankun, who suffered discrimination for the first six years after being sent to the village, only to be finally discovered in the seventh year by someone in the autonomous region’s Zhiqing office who was doing research in Tianlin county, at which point he became a model Zhiqing.  But how did he survive the years up to that point? 
 
There are three possible outcomes we can imagine.  First, in many cases when “it makes no difference how I behave,” people give in or give up, and many Zhiqing became thoroughly cynical and pessimistic, and stayed that way for the rest of their lives.  In today’s writings about Zhiqing there are people who describe them as slick opportunists, and some of them are, even if the blame for this is not theirs alone.  For this reason I cannot praise what some people call those “passionate years,” and even less can tolerate those who say they “regret nothing about their youth,” even if I myself have nothing particular to regret. 
 
Next, when you find yourself in a bad situation, some people might be good at thinking things through, becoming someone who rebels against the old system, reassigning the meaning of life to another kind of idealism, like Solzhenitsyn, who became a great enlightened prophet.  But this is really too, too hard, and the difficulty is not just finding the courage:  the greater problem is that the environment was simply too bleak.  For example, those Yunnan Zhiqing who went to Myanmar and sacrificed their lives, they surely had courage, but did not find a “better ideal,” and given their education and everything they had seen and heard, it was impossible for them to know that there were higher values than “world revolution” to struggle for. 
 
But at the time, we too were in need of ideals and faith!  And this leads to the third possibility:  even if it is a thoroughly false, illusory ideal, as long as it can lend your life meaning and make it look like it has value, then it can become a spiritual pillar to keep you from sinking further in the situation where you find yourself.  At the time, ideology told us that “religion was the opium of the people,” but in fact ideology itself was playing the role of a drug, and from a certain perspective, people need drugs, particularly when they find themselves in hopeless or desperate situations.  From a worldly perspective we might ask why, if “my behavior changes nothing,” I continue nonetheless to “behave.”  One reason is that hope springs eternal, and I continue to hope that my actions will eventually bear fruit.  A second is that this is part of “belief,” locating transcendent values or meanings in a situation that appears to have none.  Looking back now, how did I hang on for so long without giving up?  Because I had “ideals.”  This sounds very noble, but when you think about it there was no choice:  in that kind of situation, what could you pursue other than that illusory “ideal?”  And if you pursue nothing at all, what’s the point of living like a zombie? 
 
Links to Similar Texts on the Site
    
For texts related to the theme of the CCP, click here.
 
For texts related to the theme of intellectuals, click here.
 
Translation
 
Farm Zhiqing and Village Zhiqing
 
Recently, the popular television series “Educated Youth (Zhiqing),” together with various discussions of how “the Zhiqing generation is beginning to control China’s fate,” have refocused people’s attention on this massively influential movement.  Like any country, region, profession, or “generation,” the experience and values of the Zhiqing generation are diverse—I would go so far as to say that those of the educated youth generally are more diverse than most.  For this reason I am against the reflexive tendency to declare that something represents a country or a generation.  My objective here is simply to talk about my own ideas as one of these Zhiqing, ideas that I believe can provoke discussion.
 
We might start by making clear that the Zhiqing of the period were actually divided into two big categories:  those who were sent to work on state-run or army-run farms, who are known as bingtuan Zhiqing 兵团知青, and those who were sent to work in peasant villages, who are known as chadui Zhiqing插队知青.  Sometimes people add a third category, that of “Zhiqing who returned to the villages, huixiang Zhiqing 回乡知青,” and in fact, the earliest reference to educated youth in the 1950s was to this group. 

At that time, the household registration system was not terribly rigid, and high school graduates were valuable commodities.  In the first waves of industrialization prior to the Great Leap Forward, it was quite common that peasant children who graduated from high school could find work in the cities, so that those who returned to the villages to work in the fields were the exception, and were called “huixiang Zhiqing.”  Later on, however, the household registration system became more rigid and high school education also came to be seen as “universal,” so the idea that “the children of peasants will always be peasants” became widely accepted (although it took a “protracted war” before ninth-grade education was universally achieved at about the turn of the 21st century, and during the Cultural Revolution there were many middle schools that were set up by elementary schools 戴帽初中 where they did not do much more than read Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book, in other words the state invested no money at all, and the phenomenon of “brigade-run middle schools” where “elementary school graduates taught in middle school” was in fact extremely widespread). 

Thus when peasant children finished high school they worked in the fields like the other peasants, and the state “educated youth policy” had nothing to do with them.  At the time, there were some children of cadres in the city or of other “city people” who did not want to go to the production brigade chosen for them by the state, so they used connections to go back to the native village of their parents, which was called “returning to the village to join the production brigade--huixiang chadui 回乡插队, which was different from the case just discussed.  Thus most of the Zhiqing discussed in the context of the rustification movement referred to those sent to state farms and those sent to villages, and leaves out those who returned to their villages.
 
And there was in fact a big difference between those two categories:  while those who were sent to the farms encountered many difficulties, at the time they were considered to have been allocated a “regular job,” and they were paid “state wages.”  Although these wages could be miniscule, they were higher and more stable than the “work point” income earned by the vast majority of village production brigades.  Youth on the farms lived in bingtuan “work units,” which became a unique Zhiqing society, and in fact usually had little contact with villages and villagers, to the point of being completely separate from them.  As for their status, they were sometimes called “bingtuan warriors--bingtuan zhanshi 兵团战士,” while in fact they were farm workers.  Although there was no comparison between their lives and those who worked in the cities, in the early period of the Zhiqing movement, many people envied them because their “living conditions” were better than those of educated youth sent to the villages, and among graduates at the time who could not remain in the cities to work, many moved heaven and earth to try to get sent to a farm rather than to a peasant village.
 
However, precisely because their status was considered to be that of state workers, later efforts to “recruit workers” once the economic crisis of the Cultural Revolution eased somewhat generally did not affect the situation of the bingtuan Zhiqing, because they were already employed, and the only way they could get off the farms was when universities began to “recruit students” (before 1977, universities accepted only workers, peasants, and soldiers and there was no university entrance exam; admission decisions were almost completely political) or government entities began to “recruit cadres.” 

But among the “three recruitments” that offered educated youth a way back to the cities, “worker recruitment” was by far the most important; neither “student recruitment” nor “cadre recruitment” could hold a candle to it, and restrictions like political screening were also much stricter for education or to work as a cadre.  As a result, the numbers of those on state farms who left through student and cadre recruitment were considerably less those who left the villages, especially through work recruitment, and many of those working on the state farms stayed in the countryside for longer than ten years.  A large number of these Zhiqing only returned to the cities during the "great wave of return to cities" after the abolition of the rustification policy at the beginning of the reform and opening period. In fact, in the latter period of the Zhiqing movement, the farms were a less popular destination than the villages.[3] 
 
But when chadui Zhiqing were directly dispatched to village production brigades to “be commune members,” in fact they were sent to be peasants.  Like other commune members, they earned work points, and had no stable income.  Aside from certain considerations included in the rustification policy (basically minimal “settling in” expenses and living expenses for the first year) they had no social guarantees, and the vast majority of them were unable to support themselves, and had to rely on family support from the cities throughout the entire course of their experience as Zhiqing. 

They did not have the “worker” status of the bingtuan Zhiqing, nor could they become “red elements” like the “poor and lower-middle peasants,” and forever remained merely a body of people, neither workers nor peasants, who were “subject to reeducation,” and if they could not leave the villages, they would be Zhiqing until they got old and died.  For this reason, they were worse off than the bingtuan warriors both in terms of economic conditions and political status, and they truly lived as peasants in ordinary rural villages, at the bottom of Chinese society, and thus had an understanding of the villages and village life that was superior to that of those on the farms. 
 
Because they were not considered to have “formal work,” they, like the peasants at the time, could be objects of “work recruitment.”  In addition, authorities at the time understood that educated youth could not readily “take root” in the villages, and that as time went on they might readily turn into unstable elements whose employment prospects had been diminished by economic problems.  Consequently, in most cases, “labor recruitment” policies in the countryside basically targeted village Zhiqing.  In fact, with the exception of the children of certain well-connected village cadres who might wrest these job opportunities away from them, most peasant youth already living in the villages found such opportunities diminished by the presence of the Zhiqing, which was one reason for “peasant discontent,” which in turn was one of the “three discontents” generated by the Zhiqing movement. 
 
For this reason, on average, village Zhiqing spent shorter periods in the countryside than did Zhiqing on the state farms, and most left the villages after two to four years, and very few stayed through the entire process of the Zhiqing movement from start to finish.  Because they left in dribs and drabs, they did not form a “great wave” as did the much older bingtuan Zhiqing “youth” in their collective return to the cities in the late 1970s  However, because the three recruitments at the time all required political vetting and medical checkups, some village Zhiqing, because of political discrimination due to problems with their “background” or their “behavior” (the vast majority of which had to do with destructive activities engaged in during the Cultural Revolution or with bad relations with local cadres), or because they could not pass their physical (in my case it was an eye disease), wound up staying in the villages a very long time, in some cases even longer than those on the state farms.  These people should be considered those who had the roughest time of anyone during the period of the Zhiqing movement.
 
Moreover, in the latter period of the Zhiqing movement, because of Li Qinglin’s 李庆霖 (1929-2004) letter of complaint to Mao Zedong[4] about the living conditions of his Zhiqing sons called attention to the problem of the isolation of many Zhiqing in the villages, there evolved a tendency within rustification policy to “group Zhiqing together:”  in addition to setting up Zhiqing production teams in villages where conditions made this possible (in general when there were ten or more Zhiqing living in the village), there was also an initiative to set up Zhiqing farms where the youth could live together (this was not unheard of before, but it was not widely practiced).  Zhiqing on these farms were independent, separated from villages and villagers. 

Yet such farms were not like the bingtuan farms that had been set up with the strategic purpose of “settling the border areas,” and were not formal state farming work units, but were instead temporary arrangements designed to solve the problem of overly dispersed Zhiqing.  They were considered “big collectives” like neighborhood factories in the cities, and did not enjoy the formal employment and treatment as with state jobs, nor the stable income, and could be the objects of labor recruitment policies like other Zhiqing in the villages.
 
For this reason, in my view these concentrated Zhiqing were simply another form of village Zhiqing, and their situation was nothing like that of the bingtuan youth.  The only difference in comparison with normal village Zhiqing is that, by this time, the true goal of the “employment buffer” element of the rustification movement[5] was abundantly clear, and the ideological tone had diminished considerably, which led to a formal division between Zhiqing and the peasants, and the excuse of reeducating the youth by having them “join together with the poor and low-level peasants” was no longer necessary.  Many counties set up these kinds of farms for the benefit of youth from their own counties, which made the occasional youth employment quotas easier to distribute, which gave the youth from these farms greater mobility than those who had remained in villages.  The farms themselves lacked any long-range purpose, and when the rustification movement came to an end, they basically faded away.
 
Of the two categories, Zhiqing sent to villages vastly outnumbered Zhiqing sent to state farms over the course of the rustification movement as a whole, and thus constitute the main body of the “Zhiqing generation.”  However, they were spread out across the country, and their later influence was not nearly as great at the bingtuan Zhiqing who returned to the cities in a wave, and because the average length of time they spent in the countryside was relatively short, their contribution to the “coherence” of the sent-down youth as a whole is not as great as that of the bingtuan Zhiqing, and their voice is weaker in today’s “Zhiqing discourse.”  The current television series on Zhiqing basically reflects the situation of the bingtuan Zhiqing as well.  I do not necessarily think that there is anything wrong with this, but I still believe that the perspective of a village Zhiqing, particularly one that was in a village for a relatively long time, also has value.
　　
Chinese and “Foreign” Examples of Sent-Down Youth:  Comparing Ourselves to Qing-Dynasty Missionaries
　　
Between 1969 and 1978, I was a village Zhiqing in a Zhuang mountain village in Tianlin county of Guangxi province for nine years, which means that I basically experienced the entire rustification movement from beginning to end.  We found ourselves in a genuine village, not a bingtuan or a farm.  The village bordered on the provinces of Yunnan and Guizhou, and our county had the largest area and the least population density of any county in Guangxi.  Pingtang Commune, where we were sent, was 200 li (roughly 100 kilometers) from the county town, a 60 li (30 kilometers) walk from paved roads, and at the time there were women in the commune who had never been to the county town in their lives.  This area was also considered an “old revolutionary region 老区,” because although there had been no communist activities in Tianlin prior to 1949, Deng Xiaoping had led the “Baise uprising” in the Baise region which had led to the establishment of the Zuojiang Soviet, and for this reason, the entire region was seen as belonging to the “old revolutionary areas.”  At the time, underdeveloped areas in China in need of special treatment were often described by way of five adjectives: “old” (i.e., having joined the revolution early on), “ethnic,” “marginal,” “mountainous,” and “poor.” Our county may have been the only one in all of China to check all five of those boxes. 
 
Yet more than a century ago, French missionaries came to this completely isolated area to preach the gospel.  The Xilin missionary uprising 西林教案, also known as the Auguste Chapdelaine case, broke out in our county (Xilin county at the time was not the same as Xilin County today; at that time, most of the county's jurisdiction, including the county seat, belonged to today’s Tianlin).  This affair came to serve as an excuse for France to join in the Second Opium War, the influence of which on “the fate of the Chinese people” is well known to everyone, and is of course a national humiliation.  Yet Chapdelaine, who was put to death by the Qing county magistrate and who is presented in our textbooks as a “cultural invader,” is presented as a sainted martyr in the literature of the Catholic church.
 
Later, when I became an historian, I looked into this matter seriously.  At the time, high-level Qing officials claimed to have known nothing about it (in Qing law, only the central government could issue a sentence of execution), Ye Mingchen 叶名琛 (1807-1859), the Viceroy of Guangdong and Guangxi said it was a mistake, and the historian Yuan Weishi 袁伟时 (b. 1931) said that the whole thing was a “mess.”  However, no matter what history decides, viewed dispassionately,  people like Chapdelaine came to China, despite the great distance and in the near total absence of any personal economic interest, and not to cities like Beijing or Guangzhou, but rather to our distant, poor frontier community, full of hostility and danger to “settle down in the village,” and even die there, all because of the strength of their faith. 

It is very interesting to compare these people who came to China to preach Christianity and set up a Chinese church with people like Henk Sneevliet (1883-1942) and M. N. Roy (1887-1954), the “international agents” later sent by the Soviet Union to preach communism and set up the Chinese Communist Party:  the former settled into the villagers while the later roamed the cities; the former were sent by the church in a context of the separation of church and state, unlike the latter, who were sent by a government and were deeply involved in political activities, and enjoyed special privileges in China; the missionary efforts of the former did not succeed as well as those of the latter, whose preachings ultimately became “politically correct” official beliefs, and our judgements of the two are completely different.
 
However, both came to China for reasons of faith (whether these faiths were “correct” is a separate issue), and both were risky undertakings which had not received the permission of the Chinese government (the Qing government which was hostile to foreigners and the Beiyang government that was hostile to the Soviet Union), and we might describe such activities as follows:  both required a strong sense of “personal mission” and these “missions” had a great impact on the “fate of our nation” (as well as on theirs).
 
Jintang village, where the Weige production brigade of our commune was located, was called Liujiatuo in dynastic times, and after the French missionary built a church there in the late Qing, people called it Jingtang (“Scripture Hall”), which was the same as Jintang village.  The offices of the production brigade we were sent to as Zhiqing was in that church building; the Gothic roof was gone, but the windows were arched in the Western style.  I once spent the night in the brigade office, and I remember that there was still a big poster written in 1951 when the army came into the mountains to suppress the bandits, mobilizing the local masses to urge the relatives of the bandits to surrender.  When I arrived there in 1970, twenty years later, little had changed in this isolated mountain village that seemed to exist out of time.  Village people said that bandits were not something that occurred only in the early Liberation period, but had been a fact of life since Qing times.
 
I remember thinking at the time that Tianlin county was one of Guangxi’s most out of the way counties, that Pingtang Commune was one of the county’s most out of the way communes, and that Weige Production Brigade was one of the commune’s most out of the way brigades, and that it was hard to believe that the French people would want to spend their lives in this bandit-infested mountainous recess.  Later on I learned that in nearby Changjing village, there were the graves of six French missionaries who came to China at different times.  Of the six, four still had inscriptions on the headstones, where it was recorded that they died one to four years after arriving in China, when they were in their mid-twenties, which really left you feeling sad.  Of course, their efforts to spread Christianity basically failed, and more than a century later there are very few Christians in the area.  But our idea, when we were sent down, that we were going to oppose and resist revisionism and build a communist village…how well did this turn out?
　　
The Worldly and Spiritual Missions of the Rustification Movement
　　
When those of us who were sent down at the time think back on the experience, we basically sing one of two tunes:  either we sing the praises of our “idealism” (which is the same as faith, right?), or we lament how hard it was.  But we can’t compare to those missionaries on either of these counts:  the vast majority of Zhiqing went because they had to, while the missionaries basically did it for faith, a conviction that they wanted to spread the gospel; most of us left after two or three years (my nine years was the longest among my cohort), while many of the missionaries devoted their entire lives to their mission, and not a few of them not only suffered for their convictions, but also died. Compared to them, we had it easy.
 
When today we evaluate the motivations behind the rustification campaign, there are basically only two viewpoints.  There is the “worldly motivation” theory, which says that in the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, there was no economic construction and the universities were closed, so the cities could not solve the problem of work or study for high school graduates.  In addition, the Red Guards who had been incited to make revolution and rebel for two years were no longer of any use once they had gotten rid of the “capitalist roaders” that the leaders didn’t like, so they had to be removed from the cities as quickly as possible to avoid the further chaos their “rebellion” would bring.  Hence the idea of rustification, which on the economic front solved the urban unemployment problem, and on the political front facilitated the establishment of the “new order” following the end of the Cultural Revolution. 

By contrast, the “ideological motivation” theory emphasizes that the authorities wanted to “abolish the three great disparities” (worker–peasant, city–countryside, and brainwork–manual work) and make good on their vast ideals; the youth also truly believed in “integrating themselves with the workers and peasants,” and “hastened proudly to the villages” on the belief that they were “preventing and opposing revisionism.”
 
To my mind, both of these explanations have a certain basis in fact, and both of these motivations existed.  But from a comparative perspective, it is obvious that our faith falls short of that of the missionaries.  This is not only because most of us did not go voluntarily; even more important was the fact that to a certain degree, the authorities who launched this movement did it as punishment, especially for people they did not like.  This is especially true for those of us who went directly to the villages.  Certain conditions went into the selection of those sent to the state farms, and people whose names were on the “black list” were deemed unworthy, while there were no “conditions” at all involved being sent to the villages, and if you were on the black list you were certain to go there, while those who were in favor did not.  When Lin Biao’s son, in his “571 Project”[6] said that “rustification is a disguised form of reform through labor,” it provoked a lot of repercussions, however difficult it was to hear.  This is completely different from the overseas missionary movement, and the church would surely not purposely sent its “heterodox” elements to remote villages to preach the gospel as a form of punishment. 
 
In fact, this kind of thing not only happens in China.  Many “idealistic” undertakings in the Soviet Union which at the time were said to have been embraced by the people turn out in fact to have been things in which the majority did not willingly participate.  For example, famous "Communist volunteer projects" such as "Stalin's White Sea-Baltic Sea Canal" and "Komsomolsk-on-Amur" in the Far East, which is famous today for the production of Sukhoi aircraft, all in fact were products of prison labor from the "Gulag Archipelago."  Even the universally appreciated "Subbotnik" (“voluntary” labor on Saturdays)  in the past was not so romantic.

At the time, the Soviet theorist Bukharin frankly said in Transitional Economics that it was a kind of "super-economic' coercion in the transitional period."  “One of the chief new forms of coercion the working class imposes on itself is the elimination of the so-called freedom of labor.”  Free labor had to be replaced by "compulsory labor and state distribution of labor under the dictatorship of the proletariat."  Bukharin also shot down the "rumors circulated by bourgeois professors" that the Bolsheviks would allow workers to strike. He said: "Isn’t it ridiculous that these claims were made during the years when the labor army, Saturday voluntary labor, and labor discipline were being imposed?" Do you still want to go on strike for higher wages? This is a revolt!  You have to do it even if you’re not paid, and if you don't, you will be given a taste of the power of the "dictatorship!" So this kind of "voluntary labor" is by no means the same as the volunteers and volunteers introduced from the West today, and has nothing to do with any “idealism” you might personally feel.
 
We have also experienced similar things.  In the past many “revolutionary” projects like reservoirs and highways were built using traditional methods of corvée labor, and sometimes, to meet the deadlines, people were not excused from work even on Spring Festival, which was called celebrating a “revolutionary-style New Year” on the work site.  But ordinary peasants would still run off and return to their villages, leaving only us few Zhiqing and those belonging to the “four bad elements” (landlords, wealthy, counter-revolutionaries, and bad people).  We didn’t run off because the village was not our home, and in addition we were mostly temporary “white-collar workers” like accountants, who didn’t have to do the heavy lifting, and life on the work site was easier than in the village.  The reason that four bad elements did not run off was simple; they did not dare, being “enemies of the dictatorship of the proletariat.”  So those celebrating the “revolutionary-style New Year” were those who were the least revolutionary—just like the Soviet Union used labor-reform prisoners to build the "Komsomolsk-on-Amur."
 
But you cannot say we had no idealism or beliefs at the time.  When people today say they have “no regrets about their youth,” it leaves a bad taste in my mouth, and I think I have the right to my opinion.  At the time I was one of the small number that was not forcibly mobilized, but instead requested to be sent to the countryside, at the age of 15.  Staying for nine years in the village was not a matter of my personal determination to “take root” in the village, but at the time, I was generally seen to have “performed well.”  While there, I entered the Communist Youth League and the Communist Party, and even if I wasn’t a great activist, I was invited to local and county level meetings of “advanced elements” on more than one occasion.  After the fall of the Gang of Four “advanced” was called “model” once again, and I was a county “model” not long before leaving the village for good.
 
But there was a concrete reason that I wanted to go to the countryside, which is that during the Cultural Revolution I was part of the Guangxi April 22 faction,[7] which lost, and was the object of severe suppression.  Although I was a “neophyte” who had just entered middle school when the Cultural Revolution began and a nameless foot soldier, and even if I wasn’t personally affected by the suppression, the two factions were differently treated in terms of their work assignments after graduation.  Those who belonged to the victorious faction might be assigned a job, but those of us on the losing side could only go to the villages.  Because I was not yet 16 years old, and thus according to the rules had not reached “assignment” age, I technically should have continued on to high school.[8] 

But the idea of studying in a school controlled by the enemy faction depressed me, and it did not look like studying for two more years (at the time high school had been reduced to two years) would lead to a better future.  In addition, the Education Office where my parents worked had been designated as a work unit to be struggled, and it had already been announced that my parents were going to be “sent down cadres” who would have to leave the capital for some out of the way county, and if I stayed at school I feared that when they left I would have to go with them.  So instead of going to a strange place where I would study for two more years and then be sent down as a county-level Zhiqing, it seemed to me better to go right away as a provincial capital-level Zhiqing, which meant that I would go with my friends. 
 
This motivation was completely normal.  In our faction at the time, there were some people who were captured after losing the “armed struggle” (which in fact was a civil war), and were punished by the winners as counter-revolutionaries, and were sent directly from confinement to the village.  The dossiers sent with these people to the counties at the time demanded that these people be “surveilled” and “reformed.”  Again, there is a world of difference between this situation and that of the French missionaries motivated by their faith.
 
Yet even these people were not completely without idealism or belief.
　　
Why Were We so “Active?”
　　
There was one phenomenon from back then that today’s youth might find difficult to understand:  more than a few people reacted to persecution not by fighting back or passively giving up, but instead they did just the opposite, and the more they were persecuted the more they showed their loyalty to the “revolution.”  You say I’m a counter-revolutionary?  I’ll show you who’s a counter-revolutionary!  The bloody sacrifice of the Zhiqing from Yunnan who crossed the border to join the army of the Myanmar Communist Party in the name of “world revolution” is a classic example.
 
We were not close to Myanmar, and could not take that path, but the phenomenon of reacting to persecution with activism also existed.  My friend Chen Niankun 陈念昆, who toward the end of the rustification movement became the number one Zhiqing model for the province of Guangxi, at the outset had been sent directly from detention to an out of the way village.  He suffered all kinds of discrimination, but through sheer self-determination managed to achieve something in that mountain village that was basically cut off from the world.  At the time there were lots of “gilded” youth with the proper background who would be the “reddest of the red” for the first year or two after arriving in the village, and when they had “accumulated enough capital” they would leave, but Chen slaved away for nine years before “getting famous.”  And then the movement was over, and all the sweat and blood he had sacrificed in his youth forgotten.  His later life was difficult, and it was normal that he felt a sense of loss.
 
Today people have two attitudes toward models of that period:  either they mock them, disliking their “extreme leftism,” or even believing that they were faking it in pursuit of fame or flattery, and they disdain them; or they praise this kind of “extreme leftism,”  even today lauding that “passionate age,” which was more noble than today when “people are not the same and the world is going to the dogs.”
 
As a Zhiqing who was not particularly “red,” but was nonetheless a “model” now and again, I would like to say a couple of impartial things about these attitudes:  we are all human, and react to certain things in certain ways.  If you try to improve your situation through “activism,” then as long as you don’t injure someone else (and this is very important!  Benefiting yourself by hurting others is wrong, or even a sin.  There was a lot of this kind of evil at that time), then were is nothing to criticize, just like today there is nothing to criticize if you get paid for doing your job or running your business.  And if this kind of behavior brings benefits to others, as when, for example, some Zhiqing barefoot doctors saved people’s lives, then not only is there nothing to criticize but much to be praised.  And if your unhappy situation was the result of being persecuted, and you are being “active” to get out of that unhappy situation, then this deserves empathy, not criticism. 
 
However, the problem is that solely using this kind of worldly motivation to explain things at the time is truly inadequate.  Because the situation at the time was different than getting paid for doing your work, because today if you don’t get paid for your work, you stop working.  Back then we had no other choice, and things were very unfair, in the sense that while of course there were cases where activism earned praise and improved your situation, but there were also cases where somebody was praised because of their “connections” and “background,” becoming the reddest of the red without even trying.  And it was even more frequent that your “behavior” made no difference at all, and people kept discriminating against you, leaving you struggling at the very bottom.  In this type of situation, what meaning does your “behavior” have from a worldly perspective? 

Like my friend Chen Niankun, who suffered discrimination for the first six years after being sent to the village, only to be finally discovered in the seventh year by someone in the autonomous region’s Zhiqing office who was doing research in Tianlin county, at which point he became a model Zhiqing.  But how did he survive the years up to that point?  And if that “Bole 伯 乐”[9] had not discovered him, what would have happened?
 
There are three possible outcomes we can imagine.  First, in many cases when “it makes no difference how I behave,” people give in or give up, and many Zhiqing became thoroughly cynical and pessimistic, and stayed that way for the rest of their lives.  In today’s writings about Zhiqing there are people who describe them as slick opportunists, and some of them are, even if the blame for this is not theirs alone.  For this reason I cannot praise what some people call those “passionate years,” and even less can tolerate those who say they “regret nothing about their youth,” even if I myself have nothing particular to regret. 
 
Next, when you find yourself in a bad situation, some people might be good at thinking things through, becoming someone who rebels against the old system, reassigning the meaning of life to another kind of idealism, like Solzhenitsyn, who became a great enlightened prophet.  But this is really too, too hard, and the difficulty is not just finding the courage:  the greater problem is that the environment was simply too bleak.  For example, those Yunnan Zhiqing who went to Myanmar and sacrificed their lives, they surely had courage, but did not find a “better ideal,” and given their education and everything they had seen and heard, it was impossible for them to know that there were higher values than “world revolution” to struggle for. 
 
But at the time, we too were in need of ideals and faith!  And this leads to the third possibility:  even if it is a thoroughly false, illusory ideal, as long as it can lend your life meaning and make it look like it has value, then it can become a spiritual pillar to keep you from sinking further in the situation where you find yourself.  At the time, ideology told us that “religion was the opium of the people,” but in fact ideology itself was playing the role of a drug, and from a certain perspective, people need drugs, particularly when they find themselves in hopeless or desperate situations.  From a worldly perspective we might ask why, if “my behavior changes nothing,” I continue nonetheless to “behave.”  One reason is that hope springs eternal, and I continue to wait for my “Bo Le,” hoping that my actions will eventually bear fruit.  A second is that this is part of “belief,” locating transcendent values or meanings in a situation that appears to have none.  Looking back now, how did I hang on for so long without giving up?  Because I had “ideals.”  This sounds very noble, but when you think about it there was no choice:  in that kind of situation, what could you pursue other than that illusory “ideal?”  And if you pursue nothing at all, what’s the point of living like a zombie? 
 
And it was for just this reason that my life at the time was both hard and “transcendent.”  For example, in terms of reading and learning, at the time I did not read to prepare for the university entrance exams (which I did not expect to be restored), nor to develop any professional specialty, it was instead an aimless “pursuit of knowledge and truth.”  From Analytic Geometry to Lu Xun’s essays, from The Basics of Electrical Engineering to The History of the 1871 Commune, from Improved Use of Mountainous and Infertile Land to Collected Commentaries on Hanfeizi, from The Economic Geography of South China to Socialized Agriculture in the Soviet Union, from Zhang Daozhen’s book on English grammar to Wang Li’s book on classical Chinese, from the planning booklets of various county offices to the musical score of Zhuang opera from Beilu, every book that fell into my hands slaked my thirst. 

Sometimes on Sundays I would make the long trip to the commune market, and when I got there would go not to the market, but to the commune office where I would flip through the recently arrived Reference News and the simple reports issued by the various offices, and only when the market was about to close would I go buy whatever was left over.  The three young guys from Baguan village who “went to the market to read the paper” became a bit of news among the Zhiqing in our commune.  But why was I reading all this?  I don’t really know.  At the time we would probably have said I was “studying for the revolution.”  But to me, “revolution” merely meant making a meaningless life meaningful.
　　
“Mighty Oaks from Little Acorns Grow”
　　
A few years ago, Perry Anderson (p. 1938), the editor of the New Left Review, asked me:  “Many idealists who promoted the revolution at school became disillusioned after they came in touch with social reality, and this was all the more true after the Lin Biao affair.  What was your turning point?”  I told him the truth, which was that I never had a turning point, although to be honest, my real turning point was 1989.  Anderson was very surprised.  In fact, if you spend a long time in the village you see a lot of grim reality, and it is hard to avoid seeing your ideals fade, but in those years when information did not circulate widely, there was no way to find another set of ideals to take place of the original ones, and if you did not want to let yourself go under, you could only hold onto your original ideals as a spiritual support, doing your best to give your bleak and meaningless life some kind of higher meaning. 

I do remember being shocked when after the Lin Biao affair I read in the 571 Project that “the rustification movement was a form of disguised reform through labor,” to the point that at the time I could almost recite the entire document, but I still instinctively rejected the argument.  Why?  When I think back on it now it is really quite simple:  if I could have escaped from that “labor camp,” then maybe reading that sentence would have been a source of enlightenment, leading me “out of jail.”  But at the time I had no choice at all, and this would mean that what I had thought to be a meaningful life was suddenly revealed as meaningless—but I would still have been the same as a prisoner in a labor camp with no way of getting out of jail, so why would I continue to live?
 
So at the time our only choice was to live these “lofty” lives.  In my diary from those days, there is a poem I wrote in the rhyme pattern of Su Shi’s Qinyuanchun 沁园春—a style often used by Chairman Mao—that connected "national destiny and personal mission" with the life around me at the time.
 
Time inevitably slips away, and it is sad that our great ambitions are not yet rewarded.

Yet looking north of the Heavenly Mountains, adverse currents are worrisome, and looking east over the Taiwan straits, Taiwan and Penghu are still waiting for us.

A lofty pavilion begins from the foundation stone, mighty oaks from little acorns grow.

We must be diligent and multiply our labors in the field if we hope to repair the earth. 
　
At the time, I could only believe that our hard work in the fields was one part of “world revolution,” not because it really was, but because my only choice was to believe this.
 
It is because of such “idealism” that some people ascribe a rosy glow to that period of time.  And there is no doubt that when I look back on that part of my life I still have a sense of pride that I did not after all waste my time.  Forget any larger meaning, just looking at things in terms of worldly gains and losses, when the Cultural Revolution began I had finished six years of primary school, and was out of school for the three years that would have been my middle school due to the three years of “revolution” and “civil war,” and yet in 1978 I went directly from the village to join the first cohort of graduate students after the Cultural Revolution.  When you add things up and compare my nine years at “the university of the rice fields,”[10] with the six years I normally would have spent in high school and the four years I normally would have spent as an undergraduate, then I really didn’t lose any time.  To say nothing of the fact that my current values, intellectual perspective, way of thinking, social concerns, and life experience are all a product of my life during those nine years.  This is something I never would have learned in a classroom.
 
The period between the ages of 15 and 24 is a golden, precious period in a person’s life, what we call “youth.”  For myself, I truly have no regrets for how my youth was spent.  And “ideals” was one of the reasons I was able to persist (of course, it was only one of the reasons.  I saw too much diligent effort result in too many sad outcomes, and had the rustification movement continued for another five years, I don’t know how I would have turned out).  Thus my feeling is that reflexive scoffing at or dismissing “ideals” is quite superficial, even in the case of ideals that turned out to be “wrong.” 

In fact, outside of what we call “individual ideals” like becoming an official and making money based on personal desires (this is not to dismiss “personal desires,” it’s just that we don’t usually call such things “ideals,” a term which, when used in a positive sense always refers to something more transcendent), any transcendent ideal, regardless of what “belief” it is grounded in, functions much the same way in terms of “disciplining the self.”  In this sense, there is not much different between a sincere Communist, a sincere Christian, a sincere Muslim or a sincere Confucian.  (I might add that for that reason we should not talk about “correct” belief, since it is a question of freedom of such beliefs).  What is different is when it comes to “disciplining others,” because different institutional arrangements can produce enormous differences.
 
The Ideal of Disciplining Yourself and the “Ideal” of Disciplining Others
 
I don’t approve of those who say they “have no regrets about their youth” in order to affirm the rustification movement.  The campaign made them go, which means that the choice available to the vast majority of Zhiqing in the face of an arrangement not of their making was whether to complain or not, and had nothing to do with “regret” (as I already noted, I was one of the few Zhiqing that volunteered to go to the village, although the circumstances in which I made my “personal demand” were not those of a genuine freedom of choice), nor do I say the rustification did not work out to the benefit of a few people (I am one of the lucky ones) although at the same time it destroyed a great many.  I simply want to make two points:
 
First, in terms of the discipline it imposed on others, the “ideals” of the time were truly harmful, by which I mean the ideology of “the philosophy of struggle” and above all the idea that “there is boundless happiness in struggling others.”    There were too many instances where, in the name of “idealism,” people were struggled, rectified, and hurt, or even more generally people were made to do things they did not want to do, and that those that made them do it would not have wanted to do.  I noted above that “there is nothing to be criticized when you try to use your ‘activism’ to improve your situation, as long as you do not hurt other people.”  But in fact, at the time, a fair bit of “activism” did indeed hurt other people, especially when “activism” resulted in acquiring a certain amount of power.  I don’t believe that I ever did such things, not because I was particularly lofty, but instead because I was never “advanced” enough to get close to power. 
 
In addition, precisely because “in that kind of situation, what could you pursue other than that illusory ‘ideal?’” the ideal had no power:  once the situation changed and you could pursue something else, that “ideal” immediately collapsed.  In the final analysis, it was only propped up by power.  The phenomenon of “reacting to persecution with activism” that I mentioned above has its opposite:  once the persecution goes away, the “idealism” does too.  The fact that many people who were put on the black list continued to behave with sincerity even if such behavior did them no good—“sincerity” here meant pretending that you were doing this not because you were being forced to but instead taking an idealistic initiative to give your life meaning.  But once you were no longer forced to do it, the “life meaning” you can created vanished into thin air, and everybody made other choices.  Once government policy allowed the Zhiqing to return to the cities (without forcing them to return to the cities), the vast majority of the formerly active Zhiqing high-tailed it out of the villages.
 
This is what happened to Chen Niankun, whom I mentioned above.  He managed to bring together a bunch of people who had been put on the black list, and through diligent labor and heroic efforts in difficult circumstances, finally turned the group he was leading into Guangxi’s number one Zhiqing “advanced collective.”  But when the university entrance exam was reinstated in 1977, the morale of the “advanced collective” was threatened, and everyone wanted to hurry back to the cities to study.  To shore up their morale, the Zhiqing leadership office of the Autonomous Region privately promised them that they would make special arrangements so that they could register without going back to the city.  But later on, they could not make good on their promises, and everyone felt like they had been cheated, and things pretty much collapsed on the spot.  As a result, even before the great wave of Zhiqing returning to the cities in 1979, this advanced collective constructed through the flesh and blood of their precious youth vanished into thin air.
 
At that time I was still studying in the village, and did not return to the city (nor did I work very much), because I had no home to return to in the city; my parents had been sent down to a poor county where conditions were no better than where I was in Tianlin.  In addition I had become a little bit famous for writing local literature, and my relations with the county cultural bureau were very good, so I could get the books I needed from them.  So I could not and did not need to return to the city to prepare.   However, while in the past my comportment had been seen as “not bad,” I was hardly a stand-out, but now that the number one collective had dispersed, the fact that I was still in the village got me noticed.  As a result, my application to join the CCP, which had been languishing for years, was quickly approved, and I became the first “model laborer” in the county after the title was restored at the end of Cultural Revolution, even though I had hardly worked for several months.  In fact, though, at the time everyone knew that the rustification movement was on its last legs, and it was not long before I got into graduate school and left the village.  And even if I had not gotten in, I would have left soon anyway.
 
So our “faith” was truly nothing like that of the French missionaries.  They sacrificed their worldly interests for their faith, while in our case, whether we realized it or not, our faith was built on the fact that our worldly interests had been stripped away from us and we had nothing to abandon.  Once we had a choice we stopped “believing.”  From this perspective, were we truly sincere?  It is really hard to say, but during those years when family letters, diaries, and even love letters were full of “heroic language,” at least in the case of someone like me, whose comportment was okay but was never “red” enough to be used for purposes of propaganda, and who truly never sought to mistreat anyone, all I hoped was to find meaning in my life and not live like a zombie. 
 
But we were truly not “up to the challenge,” and none of us were like the religious martyrs buried in the cemetery at Changjing, who died without regret and were buried in a distant land.  Most of the people who remained in the village after the end of the rustification movement did so for worldly reasons—they got married and have ties there, or they had problems in the city—most of are now forgotten, and are growing old living difficult lives that lack meaning and dignity, and no one asks them if they have “regrets about this youth.”  Those still speaking in “heroic” terms have left the village, and they are the ones with the discursive power to pass judgement on the rustification movement, especially respectable, well-known people, but are we lucky people really in a better position than the “silent majority” to evaluate the movement? 
　　
It is Not a Contradiction to Praise the “Zhiqing spirit” of Bitter Struggle and to Revisit the Absurd Mistakes of the “Zhiqing Movement”
　　
The hard fact of the matter is:  among the vast number of migration movements over the centuries, in China and elsewhere, the Cultural Revolution rustification movement is one of the failures.  The Han policy of relocating people in the border areas, the Ming dynasty frontier garrisons, the movement toward Manchuria and into the Western frontier areas under the Qing, the Russian Cossacks’ migration to East Asia, the European colonization of the Americas, the Chinese opening of Southeast Asia, the early formation of the Jewish Diaspora and their later return from Europe and the United States to develop Israel in the desolate Middle East—all of these waves of migration, whether they were spontaneous or organized by governments, no matter their respective good points and bad points, all of them left a huge mark and had an important or even decisive significance in terms of the ethnic distribution, social change, and historical direction of the regions in question. 

Other migratory waves in contemporary China, including the unauthorized “blind movement” toward industrial areas prior to reform and opening,[11] and the waves of “migrant labor” after reform and opening, both became irresistible “historic waves.”  But the Zhiqing rustification movement, especially the great wave of more than twenty million educated youth who were sent down during the ten years of the Cultural Revolution, a wave imposed through coercive means and that went against the historic trend toward urbanization, eventually ebbed away and left nothing. 

Not only did all the educated youth sent to the villages leave, even the “Production and Construction Corps” (one kind of state-military farm) that were meant to be permanent fixtures in the border areas also basically disappeared in Heilongjiang, Yunnan, and Inner Mongolia, the only exception being those Zhiqing remaining in Xinjiang after the suppression of the Aksu Incident 阿克苏事件 in which the Zhiqing petitioned to return to the city.[12]  What were known as the “three great dissatisfactions” at the end of the rustification movement—the Zhiqing were dissatisfied, the parents were dissatisfied, and the peasants were dissatisfied (Deng Xiaoping is reported to have said this), or the four dissatisfactions—which added that the state was dissatisfied as well (Li Xiannian is supposed to have said this)—might be considered the final nails in the coffin in terms of an ultimate judgement of the campaign.
 
Yet condemning the “rustification movement” is not the same as condemning educated youth, because they were not the ones who launched the movement.  Aside from those who hurt others in the course of “struggle,” Zhiqing did nothing wrong.  On the contrary, their struggles on China’s yellow, black, or red earth, whether they had no choice or were full of pride, and whether this pride was genuine or was studied “performance,” can be seen as a kind of epic, an epic of resistance to suffering.  “Suffering” here does not refer principally to material hardship, because compared with peasants at the time, or with the “blind flows” of peasant migration toward the cities, the Zhiqing probably had it better. 

The suffering I am talking about here is more related to the fact that the Zhiqing were the objects of a campaign, and could not control their own fate, a kind of psychological torture that comes from not knowing what the future will be, a kind of helplessness.  Their struggles to extricate themselves from this torment, whether through activist behavior or by struggling against what they could not change, are all worthy of praise.  And the “ideals” that sustained these struggles, no matter what ideology they were based and no matter how sincere they were, were all extremely valuable, providing that they did not contribute to the injury of other people, and were a display of human willpower, a fight against destiny and for a meaningful life, a will to struggle so that life has value. 
 
Struggle amidst hardship is valuable, and the process of resistance to hardship has aesthetic value.  But suffering itself is not beautiful, and there is no need for us to dress up suffering in rosy colors, and it is even worse to praise the mechanism that created the suffering.  This is not hard to understand; after all we praise the anti-Japanese War but do not thank the Japanese for invading us!  Praising the “Zhiqing spirit” of bitter struggle and rethinking the absurd mistakes of the “Zhiqing movement” is not only not contradictory, because praising this spirit is precisely how we avoid reliving that absurd experience.
 
In this sense, the genuine effort educated youth at the time put into changing the face of the villages, the “activist behavior” they employed to try to change their own situations, and the campaign they eventually mounted to return the cities so they could control their own fate were all epic gestures, and left behind a valuable spiritual heritage. 
 
Chen Niankun became an advanced model after the rustification movement had entered its period of decline, and he, together with Li Qinglin, who dared to write a letter to our “Red Sun” (i.e., Chairman Mao) to complain of the suffering of his family members, and Ouyang Lian 欧阳琏 (b. 1942), who was persecuted as a representative of the Zhiqing demanding to return to the cities in the Aksu Incident, who seem to have acted in ways diametrically opposed to what we see in the rustification movement in general, earned my profound respect.  Their later lives were quite rocky.  With the exception of Li Qinglin, who “became famous over night” and entered the whirlpool of political life, only to wind up being manipulated by someone else to do some stupid things (Li does not deserve all the blame for this),[13] they did nothing wrong, and all made important contributions to society. 

Today we all understand what Marx meant when he wrote that “the freedom of each individual is the condition for the freedom of all mankind.”  The “fate of the people” is made up of the individual fates of those who constitute the people, while the “historical mission” of the individual must be based on a foundation of individual interests.  As the Qing statesman Guo Songtao 郭嵩焘 (1818-1891) once said, “how can the state seek wealth and power while the people live in hardship?”  Officials are responsible for the state of the world; the people are responsible for the supervision of the officials.  To exercise this responsibility, the people must have power (citizen power).  If we do not change the situation in which “power exploits the people’s interests at will,” our people will not know a genuine revival.
　　
For the Sake of the State of the World, We Must First Respect the Interests of the People
　　
As a sent-down youth, I took the liberation of humanity as my personal mission, and sought to do great things by starting small, and in my thatched hut, I not only hung a map of Tianlin county, but also a map of the Indochinese Anti-American struggle.  I recently traveled through Southeast Asia, and many of the incidents that figured on the map seemed very familiar.[14]  Yet from the perspective of what I know now, what I lived then sends shivers down my spine, and I cannot help but wonder:  what did the things we yearned for back then finally mean to the “fate of our people.”
 
For many years the position of our people in the world has been very strange:  countries we considered “friendly” or “fraternal” treated our compatriots—Chinese people, Overseas Chinese, Chinese business people—quite badly, and it seemed in fact that the more “friendly” our relations were, the worse they treated us.  By contrast, countries that were our enemies treated Chinese, Overseas Chinese, and Chinese business people quite well, and it seemed again like the more “enemy” they were, the better they treated us.  Looking solely at Southeast Asia as an example of a region with a tradition of excluding or mistreating Chinese, there are instances of such in Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar, and Malaysia, and only Thailand seems to have treated us well. 

But when I was a sent-down youth in the village, Thailand was our great enemy in the region, and in my mountain village I often heard the “sound of the Thai revolution,” a radio station set up in Kunming with Chinese support that every day called for the overthrow of the “counter-revolutionary” Thai government.[15]  Vietnam, our “comrade and brother,” imposed heavily expropriative policies on the Chinese, and this was the case long before our relations worsened.  But this is not the worst.  Vietnam was polite compared to the Khmer Rouge, which called itself “the best student of Chairman Mao.”  The Khmer Rouge did not stop at expropriation, but went in for massacres and extinction.  And the Khmer Rouge did not only massacre ordinary Chinese people, but even CCP members who were ethnic Chinese from Southeast Asia (many of whom were Vietnamese), who were almost completely wiped out.[16] 

Everyone knows about the reign of terror the Cambodian people went through in those years, but few people have noticed that the percentage of Chinese killed was many times greater than for the Cambodians in general, and very few of the  Chinese Communists escaped at all.  Yet at the same time, the Khmer Rouge was seen as our number one brother in arms, for whose salvation we would pay any price, even launching a bloody war with a certain “comradely, brotherly” country!
 
Now, reform and opening has been underway for more than thirty years, but our strange “international position” seems not to have ended, and everyone knows which of the industrialized countries is the most open and friendly to Chinese, Overseas Chinese, and Chinese business people.  Is it not that country that we see as “the worst in the world?”  Chinese have been able, despite their negligible numerical presence, to enter the social mainstream, many becoming professors, scientists, high officials, member of the elite.  Where else in the world does this happen?  This is something that even the democratic countries of Western Europe have not accomplished, and as everyone knows, Chinese in Western Europe can basically only run small businesses or restaurants, and only rarely have the opportunity to enter mainstream society.  We have many friends who have diplomas from well known universities there, but that are rarely employed by those universities. 

Of course, Western European treatment of Chinese and Overseas Chinese is not bad, and we see on the news that Chinese participate in marches and demonstrations, something Chinese would never dare to do in “friendly” Myanmar.  There, you have to pray that the sky will not collapse on you while you’re sitting at home.  So who treats Chinese the worst among industrialized countries? 

It is surely Russia, where not only it is commonplace to make difficulties for Chinese and exploit them, but evil practices like “gray customs clearance,”[17] or the New Star Incident,[18] when a Russian warship fired on and sunk a Chinese cargo vessel, happen all the time.  (Yet compared with the previously mentioned “friendly countries,” we must admit that Russia is not that bad, or at least there as yet have not been any large-scale exclusionary efforts aimed at Chinese).  Yet the curious logic remains that:  the country that treats Chinese the best is our “greatest enemy,” our relations with Western Europe, which treats us the next best, are ok, while the worst, Russia, is our favorite within our own category of country.
 
Where does this strange logic come from?  I’m not saying that countries that treat the Chinese the best should necessarily have the best relations with China as a country.  Making good use of the human capacity and resources of Chinese, Overseas Chinese, and Chinese business people may not necessarily be in contradiction with competing with or even confronting China in international politics and national relations.  In other words, treating our compatriots and citizens well may not be a condition for having friendly, close relations with our country. 

Yet under normal circumstances, the first is a prerequisite for the second!  Countries that treat our compatriots and citizens well may not necessarily be friends with China, but those who mistreat and massacre—sometimes on a grand scale—our compatriots and citizens must be enemies of China, and absolutely cannot be considered “friendly countries”—if the point of diplomatic relations is to work for the “fate of the people” and not solely for the “emperor’s ‘face.’”  When France went to war against China because a Qing county magistrate executed the French “grassroots” missionary who had not even been sent by the government, this of course was the act of an imperialistic hegemon. 

But good treatment or mistreatment of one country’s citizens (even “insignificant” ones) can have an important impact on the relations between those countries, which is a common principle of diplomacy recognized by democratic countries and even “benevolent dictatorships.”  Only systems which do not carry out diplomacy in defense of citizens interests but solely to fulfill the goals of the “emperor” respect the following logic:  as long as you flatter the emperor, then what’s a little mistreatment of the little people between friends?  And if you are really good at flattery, then even a massacre won’t spoil the affair.
 
But for those of us who, as sent-down youth, took “repairing the earth” as our “personal mission” to contribute to the “fate of the people,” we knew nothing about all of this.  When I saw my hard work in the village as part of the great patriotic cause or even my contribution to the great cause of “world revolution,” and when, in the very place which inspired the French to send an army against us for having killed their citizen, I rejoiced in the victory of those who massacred my compatriots, was I really making a contribution to our “national destiny?”
 
More than 30 years later, I met the attorney Han Heng 韩兴, a survivor among the former Overseas Chinese members of the CCP, in Phnom Penh (he is now the legal advisor to Heng Samrin, the "head of the Heng Samrin pseudo-regime," as we called him at the time, now the President of the Cambodian National Assembly).  He mentioned that when the Khmer Rouge launched the revolution in 1975, China, at the request of Pol Pot, cut off organizational ties with Chinese Communist Party members in Cambodia, leaving their fate in the hands of the Khmer Rouge. Some of them did not want to join the Khmer Communist Party  and asked to return to China, but Beijing refused, which made some of them so angry that they “abandoned the revolution” and sought to make their own way.  Heng Han was one of these.  As a result, only some of them survived.

Those who joined the Khmer Rouge were soon purged, some Chinese Communist leaders, such as Truong Dong Hai (Zhang Donghai 张东海), who wanted to enter the Khmer Rouge in hopes of earning a high position in charge of the work of the ethnic minorities in Cambodia, and at first they were actively loyal to Pol Pot, helping to kill Chinese compatriots, but soon they were arrested and killed, and almost no one survived. Heng was saddened to tears in recounting this, and I was horrified to learn it.
 
At the time, we went down to the villages for the fate of the nation, and today we struggle for China’s rise.  But looking at today in the light of the past, what kind of “rise” should we be seeking?  If we "rise" according to the above logic, and as a result, the high human rights countries we hate (and thus the countries that treat our compatriots well) are successfully suppressed, while the low human rights countries we like (and thus the countries that often abuse our compatriots) become more and more prevalent, and even spread all over the world, by the time "we have friends all over the world", will our compatriots still have a place in that world?
 
From this perspective, how can we achieve the true rise of China and truly improve our "national destiny", and to this end, how should we view our "personal mission?"
　　
Notes 
 
[1] 秦晖, “知青运动中的’民族命运与个人使命, ’” posted to Aisixiang on July 9, 2012, part one available here and part two here.

[2]Translator’s note: For a brief if thorough overview of the rustification movement click here.

[3] Translator’s note:  This paragraph hints at some of the complexity of the rustification movement, both for the young people who experienced it and the government officials who had to manage it.  Although the campaign was originally cast in ideological terms, in which urban youths would “learn from” the peasants, the millions of sent-down youth remained important elements in the centrally planned economy, and would eventually become workers or continue their education, and would be “recruited” as such by the state.  After an initial period of enthusiasm, most youths were eager to return to the cities, and thus completely open to “recruitment.”  Thus the seemingly technical distinction that bingtuan youth were workers and received wages made a huge difference when China’s economy began to recover and work units needed to add new employees, because youth who were in the village were not technically workers and thus could be recruited while those on the farms could not.

[4] “In December 1972, Li Qinglin, a parent of two Zhiqing from a small town in Fujian Province, wrote a letter to Mao Zedong. In this letter, he stated the difficulties his sons had in the countryside and the financial burden this had placed on his family, as well as his concerns for the futures of his two sons. In April 1973, he got a reply from Mao Zedong. To his letter, Mao Zedong attached 300 Renminbi, and wrote: ‘There are many similar issues around the country. Please allow us to comprehensively address them through overall planning.’ This became a turning point in the history of the Zhiqing Movement because it triggered the ‘National Conference on the UMDC Work’–a response to Mao’s instruction regarding ‘overall planning.’” See https://rozenbergquarterly.com/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-up-to-the-mountains-and-down-to-the-countryside-movement-a-historical-review/.

[5] Translator’s note:  The “employment buffer” refers to the idea that the youth were sent out of the cities because there were not enough job opportunities for them there, which could lead to discontent and more urban chaos. 

[6] Translator’s note:  The 571 Project (571工程纪要) refers to a document, probably prepared by Lin Biao’s son, Lin Linguo 林立果 (1945-1971), providing a rationale for Lin Biao’s abortive coup d’état in 1971.

[7] Translator’s note:  This faction was part of what is generally referred to as the Guangxi Massacre, which cost the lives of some 100,000 to 150,000 people in Guangxi during the Cultural Revolution, including dozens of instances of cannibalism.  There were two main “factions”—“camps” is probably a better term—divided over the question of support for or opposition to the existing leadership in Guangxi.  Qin Hui was an insignificant foot soldier in what came to be the losing camp.  The shocking events have been extensively studied.  Donald Sutton’s older, but still authoritative, account is available here.  For a more recent treatment see Frank Dikötter, The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History, 1962–1976, 2016.

[8] Translator’s note:  Although universities closed in China during this period, high schools and elementary schools remained open, although “education” was often replaced by political activities.

[9] Translator’s note:  A legendary horse trainer from the Spring and Autumn period, known for his ability to “recognize talent.”

[10] Translator’s note:  This is a play on words.  The characters for Waseda University, in Japan, are 早稻田大学, literally, “early rice field university.”

[11] Translator’s note:  Qin is referring to illegal movement from the villages to the cities prior to the waves of semi-legal migrant labor that began in the reform and opening period.  These earlier movements were denounced by China’s authorities as “blind movements.”

[12]Translator’s note:  The Aksu Incident came at the end of a long period of struggle in which Zhiqing—especially Zhiqing from Shanghai—requested to leave the farms in Xinjiang and return to the city.  Youth from Yunnan had been permitted to do so in late 1979, which inspired Zhiqing in Xinjiang to make similar requests, which were repeatedly denied because Shanghai was already “seriously overpopulated.”  In December of 1980, Shanghai Zhiqing finally occupied various Party and government offices in Aksu, and engaged in various activities, including hunger strikes.  The “incident’ itself occurred when Zhiqing commandeered a truck to go to Urumqi to press their claims yet again, and an accident occurred in which several youth died.  The authorities eventually relented.  Click here for details (in Chinese).

[13] Translator’s note:  Li was condemned as a counter-revolutionary and sentenced to life in prison in the late 1970s, to be released later on.  Click here for more details (in Chinese).

[14] Qin names the incidents--“基里隆大捷”、“夜袭波成冬机场”、“激战鱼钩地区”—but my Internet skills failed to meet the challenge of identifying them, and even if libraries were open so that I could do actual research, I’m not sure it would be worth it from a cost-benefit standpoint.  These are of course Chinese-language equivalents of incidents from various wars in the region that would be referred to in English or French in Western scholarly literature.

[15] Translator’s note:  Qin supplies yet another reference that I cannot easily track down, clearly the names of the leaders or the factions within the Thai military dictatorship at the time:  他侬-巴博反动集团.

[16] Translator’s note:  Qin is referring to CCP members who were ethnic Chinese, but resident in Southeast Asia, the majority of whom were probably of Vietnamese nationality.  China had been actively building such organizations since the revolution in 1949, which means these groups had relatively long histories and complex relations with local political regimes—relationships among which were also complex and changing—and supported China and local ethnic Chinese in many ways.  In the case of Cambodia, local, ethnic Chinese CCP-members predated the establishment of the Khmer Rouge, and were closer to King Sihanouk, whom the CCP had backed in an earlier period, thus having few relations to the Khmer Rouge, who were distrustful of the group.  When push came to shove, the CCP chose the Khmer Rouge over the local CCP members, directing them to join the hostile Khmer Rouge and refusing to repatriate them.  See Chen Yiwang, “The Chinese Communist Party’s Relationship with the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s: An Ideological Victory and a Strategic Failure.”

[17] Translator’s note:  An illegal or semi-legal way to get Chinese goods into Russia, often at the expense of the profits expected by the Chinese merchants.

[18] Transtor’s note:  See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Star_incident .