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.

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.

Two leading experts on China evaluate its rise throughout the past one hundred fifty years, sharing portraits of key intellectual and political leaders to explain how China transformed from a country under foreign assault to a world giant.

“Ash’s book paints a telling portrait of this most restless generation raised in a system that has provided them with unprecedented personal opportunities while denying them political ones . . . A gifted observer.”—Washington Post If China will rule the world one day, who will rule China? There are more than 320 million Chinese between the ages of sixteen and thirty. Children of the one-child policy, born after Mao, with no memory of the Tiananmen Square massacre, they are the first net native generation to come of age in a market-driven, more international China. Their experiences and aspirations were formed in a radically different country from the one that shaped their elders, and their lives will decide the future of their nation and its place in the world. Wish Lanterns offers a deep dive into the life stories of six young Chinese. Dahai is a military child, netizen, and self-styled loser. Xiaoxiao is a hipster from the freezing north. “Fred,” born on the tropical southern island of Hainan, is the daughter of a Party official, while Lucifer is a would-be international rock star. Snail is a country boy and Internet gaming addict, and Mia is a fashionista rebel from far west Xinjiang. Following them as they grow up, go to college, find work and love, all the while navigating the pressure of their parents and society, Wish Lanterns paints a vivid portrait of Chinese youth culture and of a millennial generation whose struggles and dreams reflect the larger issues confronting China today.

This new social history of Maoist China provides an accessible view of the complex and tumultuous period when China came under Communist rule.

China Witness is a remarkable work of oral history that lets us see the cultural upheavals of the past century through the eyes of the Chinese who lived through them. Xinran, acclaimed author of The Good Women of China, traveled across China seeking out the nation’s grandparents and great-grandparents, the men and women who experienced firsthand the tremendous changes of the modern era. Although many of them feared repercussions, they spoke with stunning candor about their hopes, fears, and struggles, and about what they witnessed: from the Long March to land reform, from Mao to marriage, from revolution to Westernization. In the same way that Studs Terkel’s Working and Tom Brokaw’s The Greatest Generation gave us the essence of very particular times, China Witness gives us the essence of modern China—a portrait more intimate, nuanced, and revelatory than any we have had before.

Rachel Murphy explores Chinese children's experience of having migrant parents and the impact this has on family relationships in China.