According to Ai Weiwei, the renowned Chinese artist and human rights activist, "[t]his rare book is a true record of the dark history...of the Zhiqing Movement in China that destroyed rationality, severed people's historical memory and rational thinking, and deeply affected the way Chinese people think and behave today."

During a span of seventeen years (1962 to 1979), close to eighteen million Chinese educated youth, about one-half of an entire generation of literate teenagers from China's cities, weresent off to remote places in the Chinese countryside, sometimes for a decade or more, to be "re-educated," and "to learn from the peasants." Those young people are known in China as zhiqing, literally, "educated youth," because of their origins as literate middle school graduates from Chinese cities, and also known as "Sent-Down Youth," in English. The zhiqing experience shaped the lives and consciousness of an entire generation of Chinese, including China's president, Xi Jinping, among other current members of China's Politburo.

The zhiqing program was undoubtedly the largest compulsory population shift in human history, which was carried out mainly to fulfill an ideological obsession of Mao Zedong.

This book includes personal accounts of zhiqing departure, arrival, and return, idealistic enthusiasm and abject disillusionment, tales of life, work, broken families, love and hate set in diverse rural locales, from jungle villages in China's Southeast to grassland outposts in Mongolia, from the banks of the Yellow River to the caves of Yan'an in China's Northeast. The stories narrate experiences of rape, famine, suicide, madness, true and false heroes, career de- railment and career creation, ideological idealism, and ideological cynicism, among others.

This book is organized into three main parts. First is a Preface by Wang Youfen and a Foreword by Professor Michel Bonnin, the leading historian of the zhiqing program and experience. The second part is Wang Youfen's translations of the forty-two first-hand accounts of zhiqing experience, edited by him and Robin Radin and organized under five topic headings, including "Life and Work"; "Relationships with Local People"; "Love, Marriage, and Family" ;"The Go-Home Campaign and Afterwards"; and "Confessions and Reflections." Third, an historical background essay by Wang Youfen, entitled "China's Sent-Down Youth: Two Perspectives," provides additional historical background information. Finally, at the end of the book are profiles of the principal contributors, including a fuller treatment of the life and career of Wang Youfen.

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About the Author

Wang Youfen (1927-2018) was born in Wuhan, China on July 5, 2027 and passed at age 90 on March 2, 2018 in Beijing. At age 22, in 1950, after attending Nanjing University where he was elected student body president, he joined the newly formed International Press Bureau as one of the first English language journalists in the newly established Peoples Republic of China. As a government official, in a career spanning forty years, he rose up to be Vice Chair of the PRC's Foreign Language Press and Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of the Beijing Review, the internationally distributed weekly newsmagazine of the PRC.

Robin Radin has enjoyed a diverse career as an historian of Japan and China, an international lawyer, mainly in financial transactions and regulation, and a business entrepreneur. He served as Associate Director of the Program on International Financial Systems at Harvard Law School (1998-2003) and co-founded its Japan-U.S. Financial Symposium in 1998, the premier annual bi-lateral forum for the past 26 years.Robin is a graduate of the University of Chicago (BA'63) UC-Berkeley History (Ph.D.abd'69) and Harvard Law School (JD'79) and was a Visiting Foreign Scholar at Kyoto University (1969-1971) under a Fulbright and a Ford Foreign Area Fellowship. As a business entrepreneur, among other projects, Robin was (i) a founder and CEO of a biotech company (CropTech LLC); (ii) a founder and senior executive of a mobile app technology platform company (Toura LLC); and (iii) a founder and senior executive of a minerals distribution company (White Gold Mountain Partners LLC), a unique business joint venture between a small U.S. group and North Korea (1997 to 2002).

Michel Bonnin, author of the Foreword, is Professor Emeritus of the School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, Paris, France, and the founding director of China Perspectives magazine. He is the author of the celebrated book on the zhiqing program, The Lost Generation: The Rustication of China's Educated Youth (1962-1980), published in four editions: French (2004), Chinese: Hong Kong and Beijing, and English (Hong Kong: 2013). This book is widely recognized as the most thorough and authoritative historical study of the zhiqing program.

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Mao's Hijacked Generation

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