Outside China, little is known about the process and implications of the Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside (UMDC) Movement, a Chinese state policy from 1967 to 1979 in which more than 16 million secondary school-leavers in different cities were relocated to rural areas. The Movement shaped the lives of these young people and assigned them a shared group identity: Zhiqing, or the Educated Youth. This book provides new research on Zhiqing, who were born and brought up after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China and regarded as a lost generation during the Cultural Revolution. Presenting a remembrance of their tortuous life trajectories, the book investigates their distinctive identity and self-identification. Unlike earlier historical approaches, it does this from a social psychological perspective. It is also unique in its use of first-hand materials, as individuals’ memories and reflections collected by in-depth interviews are compiled and presented as Zhiqing’s self-portrait. This innovative research offers an informative and profound induction of the topic and also contributes to the development of contemporary Chinese studies by laying the foundation for a specialized Zhiqing study. Combining rich empirical research with a strong theoretical perspective, this book will be invaluable to students and scholars of Chinese history, sociology, anthropology and politics.

Outside China, little is known about the process and implications of the Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside (UMDC) Movement, a Chinese state policy from 1967 to 1979 in which more than 16 million secondary school-leavers in different cities were relocated to rural areas. The Movement shaped the lives of these young people and assigned them a shared group identity: Zhiqing, or the Educated Youth. This book provides new research on Zhiqing, who were born and brought up after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China and regarded as a lost generation during the Cultural Revolution. Presenting a remembrance of their tortuous life trajectories, the book investigates their distinctive identity and self-identification. Unlike earlier historical approaches, it does this from a social psychological perspective. It is also unique in its use of first-hand materials, as individuals’ memories and reflections collected by in-depth interviews are compiled and presented as Zhiqing’s self-portrait. This innovative research offers an informative and profound induction of the topic and also contributes to the development of contemporary Chinese studies by laying the foundation for a specialized Zhiqing study. Combining rich empirical research with a strong theoretical perspective, this book will be invaluable to students and scholars of Chinese history, sociology, anthropology and politics.

A comprehensive study of contemporary memories of China's revolutionary epoch, from the time of Japanese imperialism through the Cultural Revolution. This volume examines the memories of a range of social groups, including disenfranchised workers and rural women, who have often been neglected in scholarship.

In the 1960s and 1970s, around 17 million Chinese youths were mobilized or forced by the state to migrate to rural villages and China's frontiers. Bin Xu tells the story of how this 'sent-down' generation have come to terms with their difficult past. Exploring representations of memory including personal life stories, literature, museum exhibits, and acts of commemoration, he argues that these representations are defined by a struggle to reconcile worthiness with the political upheavals of the Mao years. These memories, however, are used by the state to construct an official narrative that weaves this generation's experiences into an upbeat story of the 'China dream'. This marginalizes those still suffering and obscures voices of self-reflection on their moral-political responsibility for their actions. Xu provides careful analysis of this generation of 'Chairman Mao's children', caught between the political and the personal, past and present, nostalgia and regret, and pride and trauma.

"It reveals social and cultural aspects of life in rural China - something that most North Americans ... don't have a clue about," said Ms. K. Green. "It has been the first time for me to read a novel so sincere, simple and so fully detailed about China," a female reader from Vancouver commented. "This story give insight into the political, educational and economic climate in China in 1970s," Ms. Henriette Toth said. Meinia was a pretty village girl living in Xishuangbanna, China. Just after her graduation from high school, she was appointed accountant of her village. Responding to Chairman Mao's call, five members of Zhiqing (city high school graduates) came to her village. She and other villagers did their best to help the Zhiqing. But these Zhiqing inflicted huge and lasting hurt and pains on her and the villagers, ...... Filling with songs, and full of wisdom of an oriental culture, this is a bright love story for all readers.

Comparing migration in China itself to Chinese migration to Europe, this book critically assesses received ideas, perceptions and theories concerning internal and international migration.Comparing migration in China itself to Chinese migration to Europe, this book critically assesses received ideas, perceptions and theories concerning internal and international migration. The book argues for the emergence of a Chinese world system in which internal and international mobility is a central and heterogenous feature. The book presents an unusually rich case study of migration and transnationalism of migrants from southern Zhejiang province in Chinese and European cities, studies of rural-urban migration in booming southern China, implementation of the birth control policy among migrants in Beijing, discrimination and stereotypisation of rural migrants in Shanghai, contract worker teams in Beijing, and forced urban-rural migration during the Cultural Revolution.

In the early twenty-first century, trauma is seemingly everywhere, whether as experience, diagnosis, concept, or buzzword. Yet even as many scholars consider trauma to be constitutive of psychological modernity or the post-Enlightenment human condition, historical research on the topic has overwhelmingly focused on cases, such as World War I or the Holocaust, in which Western experiences and actors are foregrounded. There remains an urgent need to incorporate the methods and insights of recent historical trauma research into a truly global perspective. The chapters in Traumatic Pasts in Asia make just such an intervention, extending Euro-American paradigms of traumatic experience to new sites of world-historical suffering and, in the process, exploring how these new domains of research inform and enrich earlier scholarship.

In Tempered in the Revolutionary Furnace, Yihong Pan tells her personal story and the story of her generation of urban middle-school graduates sent to the countryside during China's Rustication Movement. Based on interviews, reminiscences, diaries, letters, and newspaper accounts, the work examines the varied, and often perplexing, experiences of the seventeen million Chinese students sent to work in the countryside between 1953 and 1980. Rich in human drama, Pan's book illustrates how life in the countryside transformed the children of Mao from innocent, ignorant, yet often passionate believers in the Communist Party into independent adults. Those same adults would go on to lead the nationwide protests in the winter of 1978-1979 that forced the government to abandon its policy of rustication. Richly textured, this work successfully blends biography with a wealth of historical insight to bring to life the trials of a generation, and to offer Chinese studies scholars a fascinating window into Mao Zedong's China. Book jacket.

Li Zhiqing was forced to marry into the Wealthy Class and was tortured by Mo Shao as his enemy. She endured all the humiliation and endured all the hardships in order to have a better relationship with Mo Shao Heng, but her sister brought her son along to sabotage the relationship between them. Li Zhiqing resisted with all her might and fought with her sister to win the favor of the President before fleeing and being forcefully brought back by Mo Shao Heng.

She, the hero of the battle, had acted out one after another, but she had made mistakes again and again. In the Alliance, she never played cards the way she did, making the five great handsome men flustered; in a showdown, she never made the five great Frigid King complain; she was greedy for wealth, she was greedy for things; she was lustful, she was unscrupulous! She was passionate, so much so that it was a disaster; she was Xue Qianyu, a modern, peerless beauty!