by Cook, James A. ,Goldstein, Joshua,Johnson, Matthew D. ,Schmalzer, Sigrid
In 1976, Mao died and the Cultural Revolution ended, but for many urban youth the ordeal of sent-down life continued with no end in sight. In late 1978, with a rapidly growing number of sent-downers rushing back to the city, those who were left behind became more depressed than ever. They had no powerful parents, useful connections, or adequate knowledge to pass the reinstated college entrance examination; going home was a remote dream. In November 1978, a sent-down girl died in a medical accident during childbirth. Strikes broke out on almost every farm in Xishuangbanna Prefecture, another region of Yunnan Province where many sent-downers stayed. More than ten thousand people joined these strikes. On December 8th, one-hundred and twenty representatives from seventy farms in Xishuangbanna gathered and decided to go to Beijing to appeal directly to the top national leader, Deng Xiaoping, with their demand—the right to return home.36 On December 27th, twenty-eight representatives arrived in Beijing, where they met Vice Premier Wang Zhen. Wang did not accede to their demand; rather, he threatened to label them “counterrevolutionaries” and forced the representatives to sign a pledge to persuade the striking youth to resume work.37 Strikes in Xishuangbanna went flat.
However, the strong desire to return home kept spurring radical actions at other Yunnan farms. On December 10, 1978, the All China Sent-Down Youth Working Meeting produced a memo stating, “From now on, all sent-down youth at the border region farms shall be treated as workers in state factories. They will not enjoy the special policies made for sent-down youth elsewhere.”38 This suggested that sent-down youth in Yunnan would probably stay there forever, like any other tenure-track workers in Chinese factories. When the news was broadcast at Mengding Farm on 24 December, it stirred deep anxiety and instant turbulence. On December 25th, Chengdu sent-downer Ye Feng led a demonstration in Mengding’s streets. Venting their enormous frustration, they shouted, “We are sent-down youth, not farm workers! Give back my urban residency permit (hukou)!”39 Sent-down youth at Mengding at first just planned to go on strike, but after they heard that the state council’s investigative team had arrived at Yunnan, some decided to upgrade it to a hunger strike. This was a well-calculated decision at a very critical moment. Having dealt with numerous work teams from the local government, they believed that only direct intervention from the center could solve their problems and they would do anything to get the attention of the investigative team. “Seeing, not hearing, is believing. We were all anxiously waiting for the investigative team,” hunger strike leader Xu Shifu recollects.40 Another strike participant remembers reasoning, “If we take the risk, we still have a slim chance to win; otherwise, we will certainly lose.”41 At this time, sent-down youth cadres distanced themselves from the agitators, but they did not do anything to prevent the strike from happening.
The hunger strike was skillfully organized and carried out. Everyone who participated did so voluntarily. To prevent chaos and avoid being accused by the government of “stirring up a revolt,” leaders of the hunger strike committee formed a picket corps, enforcing discipline among strike participants. The picket corps not only disciplined strikers, but also guarded the armory and granary to prevent looting. The strike committee picked the Mengding rest house as the place of action, since they could lock the big iron gate and thereby ensure control. Moreover, to make sure nobody sneaked in food, every single participant was carefully body searched.42 On January 6th, at 4 p.m., the iron gate was locked. Inside the gate were 211 strikers, who followed Xu Shifu’s lead to kneel down and swear their oath. Xu recalls, “Determination may not be the right word to describe how we felt; it was sheer desperation.”43 Standing outside were their friends, lovers, and schoolmates. As time passed, some fainted from hunger. Those who stood watching sobbed in pain. The hunger strike committee was clear-minded. Several key leaders stayed outside, and they kept calling the state council to demand its investigative team come to Mengding immediately. On January 8th, in the fiftieth hour of the hunger strike and with more than twenty people in comas, another hunger strike leader, Zhou Xingru, finally got a firm reply from the state council that its investigative team was leaving for Mengding that night. The students had won their first victory and decided to resume eating for the time being. On January 10th, Vice Minister of Agriculture Zhao Fan led the central investigative team to Mengding. At the headquarters of Mengding Farm, Zhao asked farm cadres and sent-down youth cadres to implement the new directive from Beijing, explaining, “The center has decided to treat the sent-down youth with leniency.”44
At 4:30 p.m., Zhao Fan arrived at the Mengding rest house and met with the striking sent-down youth who had been waiting anxiously for him. Zhao was shocked by what he saw. His first greeting of “Hello, young farm workers!” immediately incensed the youth. They angrily shouted back: “We are sent-down youth, not farm workers!” Suddenly, people in the front row knelt down, followed by hundreds of others behind them (Figure 13.5). Together, they shouted the slogan repeatedly, “We want to go home! We want to go home!”
The strikers’ perseverance and determination exhibited their strong desire and ability to change their fate. They had created a visual spectacle for the central investigative team as they collectively knelt down before it. Kneeling in China is always associated with obeisance and submission, and kneeling down in front of some unfamiliar authority shows both desperation and determination to win a concession from that authority. Here at the Mengding rest house, the sea of hundreds of strikers, many crying and many with their fists raised, created tremendous pressure on Vice Minister Zhao Fan. It was highly effective. Zhao Fan recalls, “I was faced with a petition, a strike, a sit-down, a hunger strike, a ‘circling of the cadres.’ And then the strikers knelt down in front of the investigative team . . . After talking to them directly, I could feel what the matter really was.” Zhao continues, “Although I was already sixty-two years old, I could not hold back my tears . . . Such a scenario was not something that could be stirred up by several trouble makers.”45 The sent-down youth were resolute. They wanted a definite answer from Zhao and asked him to assert his take on whether they should return home. Zhao gave these words: “Not as a representative of the center or the investigative team, but rather as a parent of a sent-down youth, I say that you should all go back home!”46 Only with such words was Zhao let out of Mengding Farm.
Figure 13.5 In a repeat performance of their confrontation with Zhao Fan six days earlier, sent-down youth kneel down and swear an oath to continue their hunger strike on January 16, 1979. This photograph, taken by a sent-down youth from Shanghai, offers a strikingly different window into how youth experienced the Cultural Revolution from those presented in Figures 13.1 and 1.9. Here, youth are active historical agents pursuing their own agenda, and not simply following state orders. Provided by Xie Guangzhi and used with his permission.
The photographs that allow us to travel back to that historic occasion and see the actions of sent-down youth do not exist as a matter of course. Rather, the sent-down youth who stood outside the iron gate and took those pictures was himself engaged in a daring form of political activism. After years of saving, he was finally able to afford an expensive camera for his own use. This amateur photographer recognized the critical moment and shot four rolls of film of the hunger strike scene. These photographs went through two rounds of censorship, once when he left Yunnan and again when he entered his home city. But the returning photographer still managed to save thirty-six pictures with which to remember the sent-down youth’s vital struggle.47 In these photos, the sent-down youth looked serious, determined, and heroic, not because they were sacrificing their youth for the state, but because they were bravely fighting for their own lives. When compared with the euphoric images produced by state-sponsored propaganda teams, these rare photographs are harsh and unbeautiful, yet they are all the more valuable because they allow us a glimpse into the not-so-rosy real lives of sent-down youth and preserve a memory that would otherwise have been effaced by existing power structures.
&nbs
p; The Mengding hunger strike led directly to the quick resolution of the sent-down youth problem in Yunnan. Zhao did keep his promise and immediately reported what he saw to the state council. Sent-downers mocked the investigative team as “becoming sensible only after being threatened.”48 Soon, “returning home” swept like a storm across all the state farms in Yunnan. “We rushed back to the city like rabbits,” recalls Zhang Qingcong. “Everyone was packing and fleeing as quickly as they could.”49 Once more, they sat on the trains between Chengdu and Kunming. However, the formerly happy and naïve faces had disappeared; instead, they had become dark-skinned, much changed, grown-up men and women.
Living with Memories
By the end of 1979, ninety-seven percent of sent-down youth in Yunnan had returned to the city. Having lost their youth, they had to cope with a now-unfamiliar urban life. From the very beginning, sent-down youth were caught between ideals and reality, principles and survival. First, going to Yunnan was not simply an idealistic decision responding to Mao’s call to settle in the countryside. Students did feel a sense of glory, but they also had serious material concerns: they needed to relieve the economic pressure on their families and go where they could find employment. However, after the harsh reality had dampened their enthusiasm, they still sought something meaningful that would allow them to live through “the unlivable.” Along with pain there was happiness, among the absurdities there were serious searches for meaning, and after all the disappointments they had suffered, sent-down youth learned what they wanted from life and how to achieve it. To them, Yunnan is a paradox much more complicated than the one-dimensional stories found in either formulaic “scar literature” or “no-regret” accounts. So many of their memories of youth are rooted in Yunnan, and they always want to go back; but when they go back to visit, they “just want to escape as quickly as possible.”50
Over the years, sent-downers have sometimes spun tales about their youth in Yunnan and told these beautified stories to their children. The stories provide them with warm feelings and comfort as they move through middle age. They also take solace in the spiritual support and companionship they offered one another in the countryside and seek to keep these relationships alive. On April 15, 2006, three thousand Chengdu sent-down youth attended a gathering to commemorate the thirty-fifth anniversary of their departure for Yunnan. The event included song and dance performances by the former sent-down youth themselves. Several days later, at the sent-down youth teahouse, the performers were still proudly talking to me about the “sensation” they had caused.51
As I interview these ordinary sent-down youth, I find that remembrance has multiple functions and its meaning changes over time. For sent-down youth, recollecting helps them formulate their own history. Even more important to them today, looking at old pictures and reminiscing holds them together as a community. Sent-down youth’s reactions to photographs are also changing with the passage of time. Nowadays, when they look at the well-posed and artificially arranged propaganda photos, they do not show much dislike. Rather, the pretty images, though very unrealistic, remind them of their adolescence and of how strong, attractive, and youthful they used to be. Even those who have ridiculed the “no-regret” attitude of former sent-down youth cadres still want to stress the commonality of sent-down youth as a whole, to maintain friendships with those former cadres, and to sustain their community.
The year I met them, 2006, was the thirtieth anniversary of the end of the Cultural Revolution. The party-state of the People’s Republic of China has been reluctant to launch a serious reflection on this unusual historical period, and the official evaluation of the Cultural Revolution has remained virtually unchanged since the early 1980s. In 1981, in its official conclusion regarding the Cultural Revolution, the reformist regime emphasized the full accountability of the previous political regime with the intention of letting bygones be bygones. Nevertheless, the past lives on and is never forgotten. Former sent-down youth actively reconstruct and share memories in ways that help them to live their present lives. Images play very important roles in both the reconstructing and sharing of those memories. Photos highlighting mob mentality and propaganda shots of smiling teenagers continue to circulate extensively, and each offers a glimpse of the past. But such images are very selective and fail to capture the richness of the participants’ experiences. The ordinary sent-down youth were also active agents in creating images of their lives in the countryside, both through idealized paintings and paper cuttings and stark, truthful photographs. By preserving these images and circulating them, they have worked to reconstruct their own histories and define their own lives.
notes
1. Deng Xian, Zhongguo zhiqing meng [Dreams of Chinese Sent-down Youth] (Beijing: Remin wenxue chubanshe, 1993), 22 and 79.
2. Chen Xiaomei, “Growing Up with Posters in the Maoist Era,” in Harriet Evans and Stephanie Donald, eds., Picturing Power in the People’s Republic of China: Posters of the Cultural Revolution (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1999), 102.
3. Ibid., 102.
4. Liyan Qin, “The Sublime and the Profane: A Comparative Analysis of Two Fictional Narratives about Sent-down Youth,” in Joseph W. Esherick, Paul G. Pickowicz, and Andrew G. Walder, eds., The Chinese Cultural Revolution as History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 260.
5. Ibid., 255.
6. Deng Xian, Zhongguo zhiqing meng, 43.
7. Deng Xian, Zhongguo zhiqing meng, 1.
8. Interview with Xie Guangzhi by the author, 30 March 2007. All names appearing in this paper are real. Most interviewees’ names have already appeared in preexisting publications and all interviewees have agreed to allow me to use their real names.
9. Interview with Xu Shifu by the author, 15 April 2006.
10. Interview with Deng Xian by Chen Xiaonan, December 2004. Chen Xiaonan is a reporter of Phoenix TV Station in Hong Kong. In 2004, Chen systemically interviewed former sent-down youth in the Yunnan Construction Corps and produced a television documentary Qingchun wansui [Long live youth].
11. Interview with Zhang Qingcong by the author, 18 April 2006.
12. Interview with Xu Shifu by Chen Xiaonan, December 2004.
13. Interview with Zhang Qingcong by the author, 18 April 2006. Interview with Yang Quan by the author, 17 April 2006.
14. Interview with Yang Quan by the author, 17 April 2006. Interview with Xu Shifu by Chen Xiaonan, December 2004.
15. Interview with Zhang Qingcong by the author, 18 April 2006.
16. Interview with Deng Xian by Chen Xiaonan, December,2004.
17. Interview with Zhou Meiying by the author, 17 April 2006. Interview with Deng Xian by Chen Xiaonan, December 2004.
18. Interview with Chu Bingxing by Chen Xiaonan, December 2004.
19. Interview with Shao Jinming by the author, 19 April 2006.
20. Interview with Zhang Qingcong by Chen Xiaonan, December 2004. Interview with Chu Bingxing by Chen Xiaonan, December 2004.
21. Interview with Xu Shifu by Chen Xiaonan, December 2004.
22. Interview with Yang Quan by the author, 17 April 2006. Interview with Deng Xian by Chen Xiaonan, December 2004.
23. Interview with Zhang Qingcong by the author, 18 April 2006.
24. Interview with Xu Shifu by Chen Xiaonan, December 2004.
25. Li Jianzhong, Huimou, sikao, pingshu—Zhongguo zhiqing [Memory, Reflection, and Evaluation of the Chinese sent-down youth] (Beijing: Guoji wenhua chubanshe, 2005), 258.
26. Interview with Zhang Qingcong by the author, 18 April 2006.
27. Interview with Zhang Qingcong by the author, 18 April 2006.
28. Interview with Zhang Qingcong by the author, 18 April 2006.
29. Interview with Yang Quan by the author, 17 April 2006.
30. Interview with Yang Quan by the author, 17 April 2006.
31. Interview with Zhang Qingcong by the author, 18 April 2006.
32. Interview with Deng Xian by Chen Xiaonan, December 2004.
&nbs
p; 33. Interview with Zhang Qingcong by the author, 18 April 2006.
34. Interview with Zhang Qingcong by the author, 18 April 2006.
35. Interview with Chen Lijun by the author, 18 April 2006.
36. Li Jianzhong, Huimou, sikao, pingshu—Zhongguo zhiqing, 564.
37. Interview with Xu Shifu by the author, 13 April 2004. Though no official publication mentions the content of this meeting with Wang, Xu Shifu told me that “Wang was said to decide that this is a conflict between ‘class enemies and the people’ and that strikers would be treated as enemies.”
38. Emphasis added. Document “Zhiqing gongzuo sishi tiao” [Forty points on the work about sent-down youth], quoted from Deng Xian, Zhongguo zhiqing meng, chapter 3.
39. Yang Quan, “1978–1979 nian Mengding: Yunnan zhiqing da fancheng de qianqian houhou” [Mengding from 1978 to 1979: the Returning to the City Movement of Sent-down Youth in Yunnan] manuscript, 2.
40. Interview with Xu Shifu by the author, 13 April 2006. Interview with Xu Shifu by Chen Xiaonan, December 2004.
41. Interview with Yang Guoding by Chen Xiaonan, December 2004.
42. Interview with Xu Shifu by the author, 13 April, 2006. Interview with Xu Shifu by Yang Quan, 2004.
43. Interview with Xu Shifu by Chen Xiaonan, December 2004.
44. Zhao Fan, Yi zhengcheng [Remembering my journey](Beijing: Zhongguo nongye chubanshe, 2003) 211–212. Interview with Zhao Fan by the author, May 30, 2006.
45. Zhao Fan, Yi zhengcheng, 216.
46. Interview with Xu Shifu by the author, 13 April 2006.
47. Interview with Xie Guangzhi by the author on 31 March 2007.
48. Xu Fa, Wo suo zhidao de zhiqing gongzuo [The work on sent-down youth that I know] (Beijing: Yawen chubanshe, 1998), 100.
