A girl goes to work in the countryside during the Chinese cultural revolution ( )

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1 Women's History Review ISSN: (Print) X (Online) Journal homepage: A girl goes to work in the countryside during the Chinese cultural revolution ( ) Ge Lunhong To cite this article: Ge Lunhong (2001) A girl goes to work in the countryside during the Chinese cultural revolution ( ), Women's History Review, 10:1, , DOI: / To link to this article: Published online: 19 Dec Submit your article to this journal Article views: 628 View related articles Citing articles: 1 View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at Download by: [ ] Date: 11 January 2018, At: 13:50

2 Women s History Review, Volume 10, Number 1, 2001 A Girl Goes to Work in the Countryside during the Chinese Cultural Revolution ( ) GE LUNHONG Tianjin, China ABSTRACT This article is an account of the personal experience of a Chinese woman on an army reclamation farm in the far west of China from 1966 to 1978, during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Although it is a description of this experience, it may also provide a perspective for understanding this special period of modern Chinese history and the down to the countryside movement that involved tens of millions of urban young people and their families; consideration is also given to the consequences of the movement upon women of the author s generation, and on gender relations of that period. On 23 July 1966, just one day before the Cultural Revolution announced the denunciation and overthrow of capitalist-roaders [1], I, together with more than eight hundred other girls and boys, mostly from junior secondary schools, left my hometown, Tianjin, the third largest city in China, to work on an army reclamation farm in the distant western province of Gansu. I became an urban youth going down to the countryside [2] from that day on. My parents, three sisters, some other relatives and nearly all my classmates came to the station to see me off. As the train began to pull out, I saw my mother and sisters crying but still I forced a smile on my face. Only when I could no longer see them did I begin to cry, too. That year, I was just sixteen years old. Why had I chosen to leave them all, as we still seemed to have a choice of our own, when the Cultural Revolution was just starting? The reasons, I now realise, were complex. I had grown up with the belief that women have the same rights that men have and that women can do everything that men can do. Thus, I was convinced that women s liberation was an integral part of the liberation of the oppressed and vice versa. Hence, to promote women s liberation was also to be a communist revolutionary and that 105

3 Ge Lunhong included me, as well as many other girls, who were more motivated by political idealism, to my mind, than were the boys. But there were other reasons. Some of us wanted to relieve our families from financial difficulties. We would be paid twenty-six yuan a month.[3] That was a lot of money in those years. Besides, the adult teenager leaving the family meant that the parents had one mouth less to feed. If this teenager could manage to save a small amount from her wage and send it home, that, together with what the family had saved through her absence, would mean a great deal to them. The last, but not least, reason for my choosing to go was the political pressure I had felt and the dim prospects for the future that I saw before me. Ever since the early 1960s, the slogan we heard and quoted everyday was: Never forget the class struggle. Since the 1950s, people were divided into different class categories according to their family backgrounds and were treated differently accordingly. Those from undesirable backgrounds [4] like me could even be deprived of our basic rights sometimes. I was considered as one of those from an undesirable family background because my father had worked in a big bank as a senior clerk before 1949 when China was under the control of the Kuomingtang Government. After 1949, my father and his colleagues were kept on in the bank but were treated as people who had worked for the reactionary government and thus, were considered not trustworthy. What made things much worse was that my father s sister had married a high-ranking Kuomintang official and had gone together with her husband to Taiwan in Although my father had lost touch with his sister for quite some time before she left for Taiwan, and although he told the truth to the Party authority at the bank, it could not remedy the fact that he had a reactionary overseas relation. It only made him less trustworthy. I was not to learn about this until I was 21 since, having felt the burden on his mind himself all that time, my father did not want any of his children to know about it and feel the pressure also. However, I had begun to feel the political disfavour myself already when I was fourteen years old. For two years while I studied in my junior secondary school, I was named by all my classmates as one of the model students, but each time, my name was afterwards crossed off the final list and I was never given the title. The school authority made the decision against my classmates vote but never gave us any explanation. I knew, however, that it was because I was considered to come from an undesirable background, though I knew nothing about my aunt, and each summer, I would hear that quite a few commonly recognised top students were not admitted into higher education. They, too, were not given any explanation. Yet, everyone knew that the simple reason was that they were from undesirable family backgrounds. So, I both had to leave in order to try to compensate for my background and chose to leave out of socialist/feminist 106

4 WORKING IN THE COUNTRYSIDE, CHINA, idealism. I loved school so much, and I knew that my father meant to send me to a university since I had a very good academic record. Yet, I could not tell my parents part of the true reason that made me decide to leave school for the countryside. I did not want them to feel guilty for my undesirable background or to add to the pressure that they themselves already felt. I simply told them that I had to follow the Party s call. Ironically, years later I realise that my decision as a sixteen year-old in 1966 not only hurt my parents but also hurt some of my relatives. They thought that I was so zealously fanatical about politics that I had decided to leave for the farm because I wanted to draw a line between them and myself. And it so happened that that summer when the Cultural Revolution started, I was seldom at home, anyway; I had to stay in school all day and even at night, copying the posters on the walls. I was extremely tired when I finally returned home two days before I got on the train but was then surrounded by my classmates from both primary and secondary schools. When they left the night before I did, it was quite late and I fell asleep immediately. My parents put everything into my luggage. My mother sat beside me and looked at me, weeping all the time until I got up at 4.00 in the morning. Only later, when I was on the train on a journey taking three days and three nights, did I regret so much that I had never talked openly with my parents. Gansu Province was, and still is, one of the poorest provinces in China. It is located on the lowest plateau in North-west China. I was shocked by what I saw when I first set my foot on it. Stretches of wasteland were covered with sand and stones. There were absolutely no trees, only shrivelled shrubs standing lonely here and there in the scorching sun. Our farm was located in the long corridor connecting the inland and Xinjiang Antonomous Region. There were barren, snow-capped mountains on both sides of the corridor. To the horizon in the far distance, there were yellowish-grey sand dunes. There were almost no natural rivers in the Province and it seldom rained. So we, as well as the local people, depended solely on the melted snow from the mountains on each side of the corridor to irrigate the fields. The first challenge in our life on this land was to adapt ourselves to the completely different conditions in this poor and remote area. There was no running water. We had to get water from a well more than ten metres deep. The well was dug into the earth of saline-alkali soil that is typical in the area, without any paving on its walls. So the water tasted bitter and astringent. It was especially so when it did not rain for a long period. I remember one summer, when it was extremely dry, the water became so very bitter that we were terrified even by the thought of drinking. For two months, the company canteen did not have to use salt when cooking dishes. Even so, the dishes still tasted extremely bitter when they were ready. 107

5 Ge Lunhong Several times, I had to put the whole dish aside. It was not until 1974 that we had our first motor-pumped well and the water tasted much better. It was a time when everything was rationed but rural people were not included in the population who were given rations.[5] We were supposed to produce everything we needed ourselves. But when we first started, we could neither produce enough to support ourselves nor buy anything we needed from the local peasants. As a result, we had only a limited number of vegetables. We ate potatoes and cabbages, which were also the only vegetables the local people had all the year round. In spring, when the peasants themselves were going without any vegetables, we could no longer manage to find any for ourselves. Cooking oil was extremely scarce. Sometimes for months, we did not have any. Then we had to eat boiled vegetables with burned garlic and soy sauce for flavouring. There was absolutely no rice. We had maize flour most of the time. Wheat flour was only used in the feasts on festivals. Eggs were extremely precious since there were no eggs on the market. The master of the company had to go especially into peasants houses to collect them. So they were only for those who were ill. Meat was also rarely seen. We had it only on festivals or sometimes when we had our holidays. The 208 of us were organised into a company, with a company commander and a political instructor as our leader.[6] A dozen each of boys or girls were organised into a squad and every three squads were made into a platoon. The barracks in which we lived were made of mud. All those of us in a squad shared one big room, which had unseparated beds along each side of it, made of wooden boards supported by piles of bricks at each corner. There were no tables or chairs in our room. We put our own wooden chests on top of one another to use as tables. We did everything in this room: eating, sleeping, reading, writing, studying and washing. Each squad was given a bucket that we used to fetch cold water from the well or hot water from the canteen. Generally, each squad was given one bucket of boiled water to drink at dinnertime and another bucket of hot water with which to wash before bedtime. Usually, three of us shared one basin of hot water to wash both our faces and our feet. After a day s work in the fields, the water was completely muddy when we had finished washing ourselves. However, we were given one extra bucket of hot water on weekends, which made us very happy. Still, I felt unbearably uncomfortable after a day s work under the scorching sun in summer, soaked in sweat. I desperately needed to wash myself. But in the beginning, it was difficult for the girls to manage to get clean water from the well. So some of us tried to find the seemingly clean water wherever we could, on the ground or in a puddle. The result was that some of us, including me, got lice. This caused great fear among us. We threw our clothes into a big pot and boiled them for hours until they 108

6 WORKING IN THE COUNTRYSIDE, CHINA, became a mess of mixed colours. After that, no one dared to use the water on the ground or in puddles any more. There was no such thing as a flush toilet on the farm. Even in cities in those days, flush toilets were not common. On our farm, toilets were built 50 metres away from our barracks. They were very simply built, unroofed rooms with a few holes dug in the ground. In summer, they gave off a very strong smell, while in winter, the excrement and urine were frozen and would push out of the holes, which would cause great difficulty when we tried to remove it. The distance between the toilets and our barracks also caused fear in the girls who needed to use them in the night because we were told that wolves sometimes came to visit our camp in the night and some said that they did see wolves in the distance. We began to work in the fields a week after we arrived on the farm. The first thing we did was to dig irrigation channels, the first step in cultivating the wasteland. The channels would be about eight metres wide at the mouth, more than two metres deep, and fifty centimetres wide at the bottom. A central line was drawn at the mouth and we started digging there. We each had a spade. Each squad had only one basket. That meant that most of us had to use our spades to throw the mud away as far as four metres at the beginning and then as high as two metres at the end. It was really challenging for us beginners, especially the girls, and soon we had painful blisters on our hands. The digging continued into late November, when the surface of the water in the channels was frozen. Then we had to dig standing in the cold water, girls as well as boys. It was fiercely cold standing in the water, but I remember when my feet had been in it for some time, they would become numb and I no longer felt the cold. Yet, once I moved my feet to change my position, I would feel the bitterness of the cold water even more. So some of us would refuse to get onto the bank to have a rest but preferred to go on digging. We girls did the same kinds of work as boys did. But usually boys were chosen to carry out tasks that needed some special techniques or courage or were somewhat dangerous, such as paving the walls of the channels, trialproducing a new fertiliser, or hunting alone in the mountains so as to get some game to enrich our diet. Girls were then left with the heavier jobs, such as digging, reaping, irrigating or removing manure. There was no preference by gender in promotion. Sometimes girls were preferred, obviously because we were more obedient and were much easier to control, and we did not show that we were inferior to boys in anything we did. Life was difficult and challenging. Winter was bitterly cold even when we were in our rooms because we never had enough good quality coal to heat them. Food and water became completely cold or even frozen when it was sent to the fields where we worked. But it did not make us feel miserable at the beginning. It was a time when heroism was greatly admired 109

7 Ge Lunhong by young people. We competed with each other. Girls competed with boys. We encouraged each other with Chairman Mao s words and revolutionary slogans. We were young and we were happy together. Yet those years were, nevertheless, years of great material and mental poverty. Looking back now, it was not material poverty that discouraged us in the end but the mental deprivation that finally sent us back home. While material life improved, from 1972, our cultural life remained poor all the time. We had no books to read since almost all kinds of books published before the Cultural Revolution were banned and labelled as books spreading bourgeois ideology. Newspapers and journals were filled with quotations from Chairman Mao s Red Book or editorials from the Cultural Revolution headquarters. Gradually, we became fed up with them. We were adolescents. We were at an age when we wanted to learn a lot of things. But what we learnt was nothing more than a coerced belief in the class struggle, which was dramatically exaggerated. We were asked to establish a proletarian class consciousness in our minds and to draw a line between ourselves and those who were from undesirable backgrounds. And, as was the case everywhere in China, soon we were divided into different groups and factions as reds, greys and blacks [7] according to our family backgrounds. Those who were reds used the blood theory [8], which was very popular as their weapon to discriminate against others. Friends could no longer be friends. Some of us were so eager to show that they were more revolutionary than others that they did some silly things. Others followed. So together, we did a lot of silly things. We broke our wooden stools and put them in the fire because someone said that the framework was antirevolutionary. We tore our notebooks that our parents and friends sent us because someone believed that the colour plate in them had the Chinese character Jiang (which referred to Jiang Kaishek) in it. We cut the plastic sandals that so many of us wore that summer because someone believed that the soles had the Chinese character Mei (which indicated the USA) moulded into it. It was a difficult time for me. I felt greatly confused and extremely isolated. On the one hand, I had to show a politically correct attitude towards everything happening around me, even an extra kind of enthusiasm to compensate for my undesirable background, and I did try. On the other, I felt all the time deep down that what people were doing was senseless, even ridiculous. But each time, I was frightened by this flash of thought since it was dangerous for anyone to think in this way. I felt that people were watching me closely and I struggled with myself. It happened that we had a lot of rain that year, which was very rare in this extremely dry area. So even now, the image of those days in my mind is the grey sky, the rain, the muddy ground and we teenage girls, gathering into different groups or isolated, idling or curling up in beds. Only half a year after we arrived on the 110

8 WORKING IN THE COUNTRYSIDE, CHINA, farm, eighty per cent of us in our company left and returned to Tianjin without first asking for permission to leave. I was one of them. Something had happened at that time that provided us with a good excuse to leave. What happened was that some Red Guards came to our farm at the end of 1966 to exchange revolutionary experiences. They were surprised to see so many young secondary school students who had just arrived on the farm after the Cultural Revolution had already started. They said that Premier Zhou Enlai had never acknowledged the establishment of the army reclamation farms in Gansu Province and so the farms were illegal. They also said that it was the conspiracy of the capitalist-roaders to send so many students who had not yet graduated away from their schools when the Revolution needed rebels in schools to denounce the capitalists. Their words were like bombs exploding among us. I did not believe that the corps in Gansu Province was illegal, but I did believe that to ask students who had not yet graduated from junior secondary schools to go to work in agriculture was illegal. I did hope that we could go back to school again. So in February 1967, just a few days before the Chinese New Year, I and two other girls, as representatives of the group, started on our way to Beijing. Our purpose was to find out whether the corps in Gansu was legal or not and to make our petition to the central government for permission to go back to our schools. Beijing was filled with people coming from everywhere in China to make their petitions. We were soon disappointed, after days of waiting, only to be welcomed by the closed or sealed up doors in government office buildings. At last, the People s Liberation Army officials at the reception centre subordinated to the Cultural Revolution Headquarters [9] received us and talked to us with great warmth. We had prepared and recited hundreds of times the reasons that would support our claim to go back to school. We had been prepared to argue with them and even for them to criticise us as deserters. Yet, to our surprise, they were shocked when they learnt that the oldest of us was sixteen and that we had not yet finished our junior secondary school when we left home for the corps. They said that they did not know of the army reclamation farms in Gansu Province while thumbing through the files of government documents on their desks and said that it was illegal to make anyone under eighteen years old to work as a labourer. To our great surprise, when we said goodbye to them and took our leave, they saw us off at the door and, instead of telling us to go back to the corps, they told us to go back home to be with our parents. And I saw tears in their eyes. I looked at the three of us when we were out of the building, all in our army uniforms with faded colour, our sunburned hair turning yellow and dry and our faces also sunburned, even somewhat swollen. Only when I was back in the city did I realise how we had changed and looked different from others. 111

9 Ge Lunhong So, we returned home. I went back to school immediately afterwards as my classmates in Tianjin told me that school would reopen in early March that year. The Cultural Revolution Headquarters called students to resume classes to carry on the Revolution.[10] But I was soon disappointed because every day we did nothing more than read quotations in Chairman Mao s small red book. Besides, I could never be accepted as an officially registered student again. I left a few weeks later and stayed at home reading the banned novels my sister managed to borrow from her classmates. I stayed at home for fourteen months. All the time I was worried about my own future and by the fact that I was becoming a burden to my parents since they had also to support my three sisters as well as my grandparents who were denounced and had had their properties confiscated. We did try to find support and ways of getting back to school as registered students, but were disappointed again and again. A People s Liberation Army official in Tianjin told us rather frankly that it was impossible simply because we had to reclaim our residence registration [11], and that alone was impossible. So, in the spring of 1968, I went back to the farm again together with eight other girls, followed by groups of others. Once back in our company, the atmosphere made it quite clear that we were seen as deserters. Every day we had to criticise our desire to go back to school as admiring bourgeois education and ideology in our morning requests for instruction from Chairman Mao and evening reports to him.[12] This continued for nearly a year, when the Cultural Revolution came to the stage of purifying class ranks [13] in Nearly eighty per cent of us in our company were considered to have made mistakes or serious mistakes and were asked either to criticise ourselves or were severely criticised and humiliated by others at meetings. Some of us, including two girls, were severely beaten by others. It was a time when it was possible for everyone to be found guilty for anything she or he did. No one could feel that they were completely safe. We were not supposed to think in our own way or to have our own ideas. I was especially asked to criticise myself and was criticised by others since I was considered the one who led the group to Beijing. Some of those who were with me when we were in Beijing and Tianjin trying to find ways to go back to school turned cold towards me. When the campaign of cleaning up the class ranks came to its end, no one felt ashamed because they were denounced or criticised since most of us had had the experience. We survived it, but with lasting, deep psychological scars. From 1970 on, we began to concentrate on our productivity. We were encouraged to learn skills in agriculture. I was interested in it and learnt to do the work in the fields quite well. Things began to be regulated. We worked hard and began to have better harvests. There were still political campaigns from time to time and political meetings constantly. But we no 112

10 WORKING IN THE COUNTRYSIDE, CHINA, longer took them seriously, especially when Lin Biao, the designated successor of Chairman Mao, was killed in 1971 when allegedly he tried to betray the Chairman.[14] Everyone was shocked at the news. Everyone condemned Lin. But then everyone also began to have doubts. I had a lot of questions in my mind and I was not alone. What was the purpose of the Cultural Revolution? Why did Lin Biao betray the Chairman since he had already been made the successor? Was it right for the Chairman to decide on the successor since he himself laid stress on democracy in the Party as early as the 1940s? Of course, it was impossible for us to find the answers, even impossible to ask the questions publicly, but the incident did shake the image of the Party in our mind. It shook our beliefs and ideals. Life became somewhat peaceful in We had the best harvest that year and our diet was enriched. I enjoyed working in the fields, which were patched with different colours in spring, summer and autumn and with trees growing along the channels that divided the fields. Sometimes, I looked at the mountains on each side of me with snow and imagined my future life. Quite often, I would take a walk with one or two of my friends along the channels after a day s work or at weekends. We would see a boy and a girl sitting there, hiding themselves in trees, and talking very intimately with each other. And we knew they were in love. We were then in our early twenties, the age when people are filled with romantic ideas and need a colourful life. But love between boys and girls was forbidden for the first few years. Nevertheless, we did manage to make our life more colourful. Though feeling tired after working in the fields all day, we rehearsed in the evening for our meeting of performance every month. But our romanticism and heroism did not last long. Soon we found that we had to make decisions about our own future. We were faced with the serious choice of whether or not to stay on the farm all our lives. When some of us did leave the farm, from 1970 onwards, to go to university or factories, to leave or to stay became ever more a problem for all of us. I, too, began to worry about my own future and the life of my family. I remember quite clearly that one day, while I was alone irrigating the fields early in the morning, it suddenly occurred to me that my father was already in his late fifties and would have to retire in a few years. My mother earned much less than my father did. I had two younger sisters who had not yet finished their schooling and another one who was also down in the countryside and could not even support herself. I am the eldest one among the four of us. But I was far away from home and had only twenty-six yuan each month. How could I help my parents support my family? I am sure that I was not the only one who suffered from this kind of anxiety at that time. Yet, our fate was not in our own hands. All I could do was to work hard and wait for some opportunity to favour me. But by the end of 1975, when the last light of hope had faded [15], I wrote to ask my parents if they could find 113

11 Ge Lunhong some relations near Tianjin to help transfer me to a nearby village. My father replied in his letter to me, Trust the Party. She will think of a better settlement for you. So, from 1970 to 1975, I drifted between hope and disappointment year after year. And beginning from 1973, the indoctrination to strike root in the countryside and work there all our life was greatly emphasised. We were supposed to give our promise to stay on the farm all our life. Love between boys and girls was no longer forbidden. Instead, marriages were encouraged. But for me, it was difficult and even painful to make the decision since once I got married, I knew I would no longer be given any opportunities to study or work elsewhere. I still cherished the dream of going to university some day, and I did apply each year. But each time I was turned down, though I was supported by more than half of my workmates. The reason, again, was my undesirable family background. Anyhow, in 1974, I was officially transferred to teach in the farm school at the regiment headquarters. I was back in school again, not as a student but as a teacher. I was happy with my students, nearly all of them the children of farm workers. From 1975, however hesitant and unwilling we were, more and more of us began to get married. Yet, there was great disappointment among us when we finally realised that most of us could never expect to be favoured by opportunities to go to university or factories. Along with the disappointment, there appeared a feeling of grievance and resentment. We felt we had been cheated and a lot of us became very passive. Sometimes in the holidays, when I went back to my company to join my friends there and looked at the shabby barracks, the gloomy fields and my disappointed workmates, I felt sad for all of us. The whole of 1976 seemed to pass rapidly, in mourning and power struggles within the Party s central committee; first the mourning for the death of Zhou Enlai, then for the death of Mao Zedong, with the news of the demonstration in Tiananmen Square, and the denouncement of Deng Xiaoping in between, followed in the end by the long-expected arrest of the Gang of Four.[16] Then 1977 began with much hope and expectation. It turned out to be the turning point of my life. Blood theory was criticised and abolished. For the first time since the age of fourteen, I felt greatly relieved and happy. Most of the books banned during the Cultural Revolution began to reappear or be republished and young people were encouraged to read them. Then news began to spread that examinations for admitting university students would be resumed later that year. The news caused a great stir and excitement in me. But I was by then in my late twenties and had lost confidence in myself. I had been kept away from what I had learned in school for more than ten years and it was said that the competition would be very severe that year. For each place in the university, there were more 114

12 WORKING IN THE COUNTRYSIDE, CHINA, than twenty-five candidates. But this could be the last opportunity for me. I made the decision after much hesitation and I did not tell my parents about my decision. I had to wait for more than two months for the notice of the examination results. For me, those two months seemed to be two years. Finally, in early February of 1978, news came that I was admitted to Gansu Normal University. The next day, I went to the post office in the town and sent a telegram to my parents telling them the news. I was proud of myself, and I had every reason to be proud because, although it was ten years late, I had finally made my long-cherished dream come true. I had depended solely on my own ability and efforts. I had not had to sell either my body or my soul. My parents told me later that the night they received my telegram, they could not sleep the whole night. That year I was one of the only two urban youth on our farm who were admitted into universities. I started my life in the university in March Once I was in the university, I was in a world of learning. I found myself among people of brilliant minds, extraordinary strength and determination. A lot of them were already well equipped with background knowledge and basic skills and I had to work very hard to catch up with them. So, for quite a long time, I did not keep much contact with my workmates though I could hear news of them. Obviously, the women of my generation suffered much more than the men did when we were in the countryside. Some of us were taken advantage of sexually by farm or local officers or officials when they sought their ways to go to university or factories or to go back home, and some of these women are still suffering from the psychological damage today. Even when we are back home today, women are suffering more effects of those years than the men. Some of us who did not marry when we were in the countryside remain single, not out of choice but because of the sudden change of the Government s policy and people s conception of marriage.[17] Since 1995, more and more women of the veteran urban youth have had to retire from jobs when we passed the age of 45 and also because most of us are less educated and so are unskilled workers. I myself was fortunate. I got married at the age of thirty-five, though that is late in the opinion of Chinese people, and I have had a child as well as an academic career. But whenever I recall my years on the farm, I feel that it is like a broken tooth in my mouth. It is worn out and ugly. It makes me feel uncomfortable. I have to pull it out. Yet, I will not throw the tooth away since it is part of my life. Without it, my life would not be complete. There is a difficult balance to draw. I did lose something in my life during those years of cultural starvation. I did suffer psychologically when I was an adolescent in those years of political pressure. And that turns out to have had an enormous effect in the development of my personality as well as my later life. It has taken me a long time to regain my lost self-confidence. I lost 115

13 Ge Lunhong ten years of the most precious time in my life. At times, I felt tortured by my life in the countryside, but I was also strengthened and nourished by it. I am not defeated. I learned things about life, people and myself that I would never otherwise have learned and had warm relationships with people whom I would never otherwise have met. Notes [1] A term coined to refer to those Party officials who were believed to have adopted the capitalist method in China s economic and ideological constructions. The former chairman of the state, Liu Shaoqi, and the Party s General Secretary Deng Xiaoping were the highest ranking among them. [2] Urban youth had begun to go to work and settle in the countryside as early as the 1950s. In the beginning, young people chose to go on a voluntary basis and only a small number of them were sent. With the pressure of urban unemployment increasing in the 1960s, however, larger numbers were encouraged to go and settle in rural areas. During the Cultural Revolution ( ), with all the schools, colleges and universities closed and several grades of graduates waiting to go for higher education or jobs, yet factories, government offices and service industries unable to accept them, it became a compulsory policy of the Government to send 90% of the graduates to the countryside. Hence, it became a nationwide movement. The down to the countryside movement reached its climax in The number of urban youth involved was tens of millions. [3] It was two-thirds of the monthly wage of a young worker or less than half of the monthly salary of a young university teacher. On the average, a boy would need to spend twelve fifteen yuan on meals every month while a girl needed ten twelve yuan. [4] As the political power struggle increased within the Party and the policy let a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend turned into the Anti-Rightist movement in 1957 and the anti-right- Opportunist movement in 1959, Mao Zedong believed that the basic conflict within Chinese society was still conflict between people from exploiting classes and exploited classes. More and more emphasis was focused on people s family backgrounds. Those who were from families of landlords, rich peasants or capitalists before 1949, counter-revolutionaries, bad elements and rightists belonged to the exploiting classes and were hence unreliable and untrustworthy. Those who were from families of workers, poor or lower middle peasants or farm labourers before 1949, revolutionary army men or cadres and martyrs belonged to the exploited classes and hence were reliable and trustworthy. [5] The supply of food and cloth had been rationed since the 1950s as a measure both to ensure the supply and to prevent the population flow from rural areas to cities and towns. 116

14 WORKING IN THE COUNTRYSIDE, CHINA, [6] In 1968, when large numbers of urban youth were sent to work on farms set up on wastelands in remote areas, all these farms began to be attached to the army. Urban youth working on these farms were organised into army units and were trained as soldiers at the same time. [7] See note 4. Reds refers to those who were from the exploited classes or desirable family backgrounds. Blacks refers to those who were from exploiting classes or undesirable family backgrounds. Greys refer to those who were from neither the exploited nor the exploiting classes. [8] The theory appeared as a slogan that goes: The son of a hero is always a great man; a reactionary father produces nothing but a bastard. It was set to music and was sung in the streets by the Red Guards. [9] The reception centre aimed to listen to and to access the numerous petitions of people coming to Beijing from everywhere in the country and then send them back to local authorities or to the Party Central Committee for final judgement. [10] All the schools had been closed down ever since the summer of Students began to travel everywhere in the country by train free of charge to exchange their experiences in exposing and denouncing capitalistroaders. There were fights in schools and streets. Some students became hooligans and society was in turmoil. To resume classes to carry on the revolution aimed to call students back to schools in order to regain control rather than to resume normal teaching and learning. [11] Urban population had been registered since early 1950s. People were forbidden to move to other cities without permission of the local government. While the rural population was strictly forbidden to move into cities, it was much easier for urban residents to move to the countryside. My resident registration had been cancelled immediately after I decided to leave Tianjin at sixteen. [12] It was a common practice in the early stage of the Cultural Revolution, something like a religious rite. People would stand in front of a picture or a photograph of Chairman Mao first thing in the morning to tell him what they planned to do during the day and request instructions from the Chairman, and also the last thing in the evening to report to him what they had done during the day, confess their evil thoughts and deeds, and ask the Chairman to make comments or criticisms. [13] It was an important stage of the Cultural Revolution following denouncing capitalist-roaders. While the denouncement of capitalist-roaders aimed at the enemies within the Party, cleaning up the class ranks was aimed at the enemies outside the Party. [14] Lin Biao was one of the ten marshals before the Cultural Revolution. He replaced Peng Dehuai as defence minister in 1959 when Peng had been purged, and was designated as Mao Zedong s successor by the Chairman himself in He fled by plane after his alleged plot against the Chairman was discovered in 1971 but was killed when the plane crashed en route to the Soviet Union. 117

15 Ge Lunhong [15] One of the Government s policies towards urban youth in the countryside was that anyone who passed the age of twenty-five would not be eligible to go to university or factories. And most of us were twenty-five in [16] The leftist faction within the Party including Mao Zedong s wife, Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan and Wang Hongwen, who gained much power as the Central Cultural Revolution Small Group and were arrested in 1976 after Mao Zedong s death. [17] Since 1949, the legal age of marriage for women was eighteen and that for men was twenty. During the Cultural Revolution, there was a compulsory policy that forbade urban youth to marry before they were twenty-five years old. But after the Cultural Revolution in 1980, the New Marriage Law defined the legal age for marriage for women as twenty and that for men as twenty-two. Bibliography Chang, J. (1993) Wild Swans. London: Harper Collins. Cheng Jiang (1998) Lao Zhiqing [Veteran urban youth]. Beijing: China Petroleum Industry Publishing House. Deng Xian (1993) Zhongguo Zhiqing Meng [Dream of Chinese urban youth]. Beijing: People s Literature Publishing House. Feng Jicai (1997) Yibaige Ren De Shinian [Memories of one hundred people of the decade]. Nanjing: Jiangsu Literature and Art Publishing House. King, R. (Ed.) (1998) Renditions, a Chinese English Translation Magazine, 50, Special Issue: There and Back Again: the Chinese urban youth generation. Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong. Lao Gui (1987) Xuese Huanghun [The scarlet dusk]. Beijing: Workers Publishing House. Liang Xiaosheng (1998) Nianlun [The growth ring]. Xi an: Economics Daily and Shaanxi Travelling Publishing Houses. Townsend, J.R. (1967) The Revolution of Chinese Youth. Berkeley: University of California Press. Xiao Jian (1998) Zhongguo Zhiqing Chanhui Lu [Repentance of China urban youth]. Beijing: China Youth Publishing House. Xiao Jian (1998) Zhongguo Zhiqing Haiwai Lu [China veteran urban youth abroad]. Beijing: China Youth Publishing House. Xiao Jian (1998) Zhongguo Zhiqing Miwen Lu [Inside stories of China urban youth in the countryside]. Beijing: China Youth Publishing House. Ye Xin (1992) Niezhai [The wages of sin]. Nanjing: Jiangsu Literature and Art Publishing House. Zhang Kai & Ji Yuan (1997) You Shuo Laosanjie [Also on the older three graders of secondary school graduates]. Beijing: China Youth Publishing House. 118

16 WORKING IN THE COUNTRYSIDE, CHINA, GE LUNHONG is an Associate Professor in the College of Foreign Languages, Tianjin Normal University, Tianjin, People s Republic of China (lhge@public.tpt.tj.cn). She has published a number of translations and supplementary textbooks, and from October 1998 to September 1999 was a Visiting Research Fellow, supported by the British Academy K.C. Wong Fellowship, in the School of Cultural and Community Studies, University of Sussex, United Kingdom. It was while she was at Sussex that the present article was written. Her address for correspondence is Biyunli, Guizhou Road, Tianjin , China. 119

17 Ge Lunhong CALL FOR PAPERS 2002 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, 6 9 June 2002 The 12th Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Local Knowledge Global Knowledge, will be held 6 9 June 2002 at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, Connecticut, USA. The Program Committee welcomes proposals that explore the relationship between local knowledge, global knowledge, the history of women, and the emergence of notions of gender across time and culture. How have people reconfigured their ideas and representations to take account of expanding -- or contracting worlds, changing economic conditions, and new demands for labor? What are the specific challenges to historians of women posed by indigeneity, nationalism, imperialism and ethnicity? What is the relation between what we can know about women in any local situation and what we can know about women broadly and comparatively? The Committee particularly encourages submissions in earlier periods, those which address sources and methodology, and panels that break down the divide between the west (North America and Western Europe) and other regions of the world. Funding may be available for some international panelists. Please submit three (3) copies of the full proposal, postmarked by 15 December 2000 to one of the addresses listed below. Each proposal must include a cover sheet (downloadable from our website); a title and one-page abstract for each paper or presentation; a one-page curriculum vitae/resumé for each participant (including the chair and comment); and a self-addressed, stamped postcard. Send proposals on European topics to Ruth Mazo Karras, Department of History, University of Minnesota, 614 Social Sciences Building, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA; for Africa, Latin America, Asia, the Pacific, and all comparative topics to Barbara Molony, Department of History, Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, CA 95053, USA; for Canada and the USA topics to Claire Potter, Center for the Americas, 255 High Street, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT 06457, USA. For the full text of the Call for Papers and instructions please visit our website at 120