The Cultural Revolution was an emotionally charged political awakening for the educated youth of China. Called upon by aging revolutionary Mao Tse-tung to assume a “vanguard” role in his new revolution to eliminate bourgeois revisionist influence in education, politics, and the arts, and to help to establish proletarian culture, habits, and customs, in a new Chinese society, educated young Chinese generally accepted this opportunity for meaningful and dramatic involvement in Chinese affairs. It also gave them the opportunity to gain recognition as a viable and responsible part of the Chinese polity. In the end, these revolutionary youths were not successful in proving their reliability. Too “idealistic” to compromise with the bourgeois way, their sense of moral rectitude also made it impossible for them to submerge their factional differences with other revolutionary mass organizations to achieve unity and consolidate proletarian victories. Many young revolutionaries were bitterly disillusioned by their own failures and those of other segments of the Chinese population and by the assignment of recent graduates to labor in rural communes. Educated Youth and the Cultural Revolution in China reconstructs the events of the Cultural Revolution as they affected young people. Martin Singer integrates material from a range of factors and effects, including the characteristics of this generation of youths, the roles Mao called them to play, their resentment against the older generation, their membership in mass organizations, the educational system in which they were placed, and their perception that their skills were underutilized. To most educated young people in China, Singer concludes, the Cultural Revolution represented a traumatic and irreversible loss of political innocence, made yet more tragic by its allegiance to the unsuccessful campaign of an old revolutionary to preserve his legacy from the inevitable storms of history.

This title was first published in 1972: This bibliography is the most comprehensive and up-to-date reference work available on developments in Chinese education since 1966. In addition to primary materials from the people's Republic of China, the entries are drawn from other Asian sources, as well as from American and European studies. All levels and major fields of education are covered, and the pervasive impact of idealogy and politics on education is carefully documented. Most entries are fully annotated , and many are cross listed. Professors Fraser and Hsu have prepared a lengthy introduction which provides valuable information on the research centers, journals and publishing/translating agencies active in the field.

During the Cultural Revolution over 14 million Chinese high school graduates were sent from the cities to live and work in the countryside. They were known as zhiqing – ‘educated youth’. They fell in love, married, had children. In the late 1970s the policy changed and they were allowed to return, but not their families. Many jumped at the opportunity, leaving spouses and children behind. Ten years later the children, now teenagers, began to turn up in the cities, looking for their parents. Educated Youth follows five such children, who have travelled across China from a province in the south west to Shanghai in the east, only to discover that their mothers and fathers have remarried, and have new families, in which there is no room for them. Their reappearance brings out the worst in the parents – their duplicity, greed and self-interest – and the best too, as they struggle to come to terms with their sense of love and duty.

The lives and aspirations of young Chinese (those between 14 and 26 years old) have been transformed in the past five decades. By examining youth cultures around three historical points - 1968, 1988 and 2008 - this book argues that present-day youth culture in China has both international and local roots. Paul Clark describes how the Red Guards and the sent-down youth of the Cultural Revolution era carved out a space for themselves, asserting their distinctive identities, despite tight political controls. By the late 1980s, Chinese-style rock music, sports and other recreations began to influence the identities of Chinese youth, and in the twenty-first century, the Internet offers a new, broader space for expressing youthful fandom and frustrations. From the 1960s to the present, this book shows how youth culture has been reworked to serve the needs of the young Chinese.

"From Tea to Coffee is a wonderful exploration of history and a life that has extended across half a century and two continents. For those who believe that East and West can never meet or can only stand in opposition to each other, this memoir offers a beautiful counterpoint." -Bennett R. Coles, award-winning author of six published books including Dark Star Rising "Cheng Wang's transformative evolution from young Communist ideologue to astute western observer is a must-read cultural travelogue." -Don Vaughan, founder, Triangle Association of Freelancers, North Carolina Following Mao's call to the young during the Cultural Revolution, Cheng Wang, a so-called "Educated Youth," boarded a train destined for a secluded village in Inner Mongolia for the compulsory period of re-education. For the next three grueling years in rural exile, he pondered how his once privileged family had been caught in a political undertow, and how his own future might unfold. From Tea to Coffee is a story of struggle and triumph during China's modern-day cultural and political drama, and is a rare and personal account that showcases the Chinese national psyche. Like all political movements of the past, the Cultural Revolution was not the first of its kind, nor quite possibly the last, yet Cheng Wang, now at home in both America and in China, maintains an optimism in confronting today's social polarization between the East and the West.