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In December 1968 Mao Zedong proclaimed that China's educated urban youth should move to the countryside to be reeducated by the poor and lower middle peasants. Some seventeen million who responded to his call spent the better part of a decade laboring in remote and impoverished regions.
Returning to the cities in the late 1970s, undereducated, unemployed, and manifestly unprepared to contribute to China's post-Maoist future, the rusticated youth were dubbed the "Lost Generation". How then, could China transform itself into an economic and military behemoth without the support of an entire generation of educated men and women?
A close look at a group of young Beijingers suggests that at least some of the rusticated millions reentered urban life with assets that enabled them to play a creative role. "The Beijing Fifty-five" were atypical insofar as they had volunteered to carve rubber plantations out of a tropical wilderness on China's southwest border a year before the wave of involuntary recruits. However, their struggle to survive cultural, political, and physical challenges was typical.
Drawing from the spoken and written testimony of the Fifty-five, this book shows in dramatic detail how "The Lost Generation" survived the tribulations of the Mao years to help build today's China.
About the author
John Israel is well known for his writings on students and higher education in Twentieth Century China. Professor Israel conducted research in Taiwan and Hong Kong (1959-1962, 1973) and in the People's Republic of China since 1980. Following normalization of US-China diplomatic relations, he became the first post-1949 American resident professor in Kunming. Over the past four decades, he has lived and studied in China - particularly in Yunnan province - for extensive periods. John in emeritus professor of history at University of Virginia
Summary
This book provides a detailed and in-depth study of a group of volunteers among the much larger group of rusticated youth, who were mainly only “forced volunteers”. This specific group, although not representative, is interesting because it shows how idealists (considered as “models”) reacted on the long term to an unexpected reality.
