The Lost Generation of the Cultural Revolution
Anonymous
Few people disagree that the Great Chinese Proletarian Cultural Revolution was one of the darkest periods in recent Chinese history, but one demographic category was especially hard hit. This group of people has been named �the Lost Generation� by journalists and sinologists alike. At the start of the Cultural Revolution in 1966 they were young people between the ages of twelve and eighteen. Most were from urban or suburban backgrounds and had never been to the countryside before. At the heart of the Cultural Revolution was Mao�s plan to abolish those remaining �bourgeoisie and Rightist Elements�, to eliminate corruption, to keep China on a solid Socialist track to Communism, and to educate young people about the work of the proletariat thereby preventing class separation. Over the course of the next ten years things went tragically wrong.
Plan after idealistic plan was put into action with often serious deleterious effects to an already suffering Chinese family unit, society and economy. It was only five years earlier that an estimated thirty million people starved during a previous Socialist experiment/ campaign called the Great Leap Forward. All over China those who did not starve barely had enough to eat and every staple of daily life was rationed. One Cultural Revolution project focused on reassessing the education of China�s youth. Most but not all of these young people were already members of the infamous Red Guard. Believing they were acting in accordance with the words of Chairman Mao, roving bands of Red Guards terrorized all members of a region or village maliciously searching for and destroying anything that could be deemed against the party or its moral, political and social goals. It was decided that a large number of young people from urban and surrounding areas would be sent deep into the Chinese countryside to learn the skills and importance of hard, physical work from the peasants. The Red Guards also possessed a significant amount of power in their small isolated groups and the high-ranking Communist party officials quickly realized that should large factions of Red Guards organize, they could pose a threat.
�Red Guard� was a loosely used term and not all young people were indeed members of the Guard. Still, large numbers of youths departed for the countryside, Red Guard or not. Much of China was in a state of chaos and all young people were allowed to take buses and trains to get to their rural destinations free of charge. Initially, rural work was designed to be a short-term component of education, but as the Cultural Revolution dragged on schools were closed in late 1967 and 1968. Kids were essentially trapped far away from home in harsh conditions having never done work like that before in their lives. This time did have some positive effects in teaching young people, later referred to as �sent down youth�, how difficult manual labor can be, but it also had many negative repercussions. Most kids could not understand the local dialect and everyone involved had difficulty communicating. They did not know how to farm or do other kinds of labor and the peasants had to take time to show them thereby distracting them from their work. Towards the later parts of the Cultural Revolution, China was again facing the prospect of another food shortage all too reminiscent of the Great Leap �Backward�. In many regions the practice of agriculture was being done by inexperienced people against their will.
Other sent down youths pleaded with the local officials to go home. They were terribly homesick and in some cases had not seen their families for years. There was a good chance that their families were split up and sent to different remote rural areas in another part of China making communication and a reunion almost impossible. Instead of learning an appreciation and new-found vigor in manual labor, the work young people did often reinforced why they were going to school and wanting to get good jobs � so they themselves did not have to spend the rest of their lives toiling in the fields. The kids were at the mercy of the local village officials and wide-scale rape of young girls was not uncommon in some areas.
The Lost Generation did not suffer nearly as much in the fields as they would later. In fact, the real tragedy inflicted upon this young sector of society by the events of the Cultural Revolution and its architects was what they missed out on. Over the course of the ten years of the Revolution, most did not go to school and if they did, it was not an academic education. The concept of learning and attaining knowledge in the traditional sense was �a relic of the past� and a �bourgeoisie element�. Time spent in the classroom was often with young people like themselves who had slightly more education than the masses and were therefore labeled teachers. This could mean as little as a fifth-grade education. The real teachers and professors were almost certainly imprisoned, sent to hard labor camps or in worst cases killed for their knowledge which could, in the eyes of the ultra-rightist Communist society, lead to them becoming leftists. Textbooks were generally destroyed or not able to be used because of the information they contained about the bad elements of the past. In extreme cases students were forced to rewrite their own textbooks often lying about history for the sake of glorifying the Communist Revolution earlier in the century as well as the Communist Party. Those books were nothing less than creatively strong propaganda with little factual basis. If the writings were to the contrary, the consequences could have been dire.
The plight of students involved elementary, middle, and high school students as well as a select handful of university students. Most colleges and universities were not functional for the masses until 1974 or later. In her book Red China Blues: My Long March From Mao Until Now Jan Wong looks back on the experiences of she and her classmates and describes the plight of young college students in the middle of the of the Cultural Revolution:

"We were all forty-one years old, and feeling it. As I watched Scarlet squint at the menu because she needed bifocals, I reflected that she and my other classmate were part of Mao�s Lost Generation. Scarlet hadn�t finished high school because of the Cultural Revolution. In Yanan, she spent years toiling in the fields before getting into university on the strength of her political correctness. At college, ongoing campaigns wrecked her last chance at an education. After she graduated, a mere formality since no worker-peasant-solder student could ever be allowed to fail, Maoism was discredited, so nobody wanted to hire someone like her who had spent her time doing heavy labor instead of studying. By the time she married, new population-control rules limited her to a single child. Recently, Deng�s education czar had downgraded her university diploma to a technical school certificate, a move that affected housing, salary, promotions and perks. And now, she was stuck in a dead-end job at the Beijing Library. Due to a surge in unemployment, she faced involuntary early retirement in just four years. I shuddered. Retirement? I had just weaned Sam, my second son, a month earlier." p. 66

Most students did not get the chance to go to college or finish high school. A handful did return to school and go onto to earn a college degree, but the years between 1974-1980 were wrought with problems of academic standards, finding professors, and bringing the student body up to uniform proficiency levels. The hypotheticals abound, but China could have had a generation of academically skilled young people and a successful system of thriving institutions of higher learning, but as a direct result of the Cultural Revolution that and so much more was lost. The most difficult concept associated with the plight of these young people is that they were caught up in a political power struggle and social movement they had little interest or say in. The student portion of the label �worker-peasant-soldier-student� was later dropped as the government realized that the young people were far from educated.
In the case of many members of the Lost Generation, the Cultural Revolution defined their role and existence in Chinese society for the rest of their lives. They were part of a couple of generations that worked the majority of their adult lives under the promise of the Iron Rice Bowl. Under this system of policies, people worked for state-owned and run companies earning relatively little money, but in turn the government took care of all aspects of their life, e.g., healthcare, housing, family planning, food rations, retirement care and other social services. With the economic changes brought about in the early 1980s and continuing today, the Iron Rice Bowl has started to crack. The social services, especially healthcare and retirement pensions are at risk of not being available for the members of the Lost Generation as they begin to retire. So many people of that age are either retiring all at once or being forced out of their jobs because of the greater societal unemployment problems to make way for younger workers. The quality of those same social services is often only as good as their local Danwei or work unit can afford. Some Danweis are much better off than others and the government can do little to correct those inequalities which, in certain regions, are wide-scale.
Late last semester I learned first-hand about the how so many missed out on an education during and after the Cultural Revolution. I visited a night school founded by Professor Zhan�s father. In 1977, after spending several years doing hard labor under house arrest in what was once his own factory, Professor Zhan�s father was pardoned and released. He had been persecuted for being a factory/ business owner. He then took all of the money he was given in back payment from the government and established a night school at one of the local high schools. Since its establishment it has been one of the most successful such schools in all China, especially Zhejiang Province and model for others. Zhan�s father created the school because he knew so many young and old people alike who cherished and pursued a good education had missed out. Over 100,000 students later, the school has made a tremendous contribution to the community and the lives of Hangzhou citizens. Today the school has over 5,000 enrolled students and several satellite campuses.
I visited several classes during our visit and each group had a handful of older students, usually in their late thirties or early forties, who were finally in a position to earn the education they�d always wanted. Every case is different, but some people spoke openly about how they missed out on education because of the Cultural Revolution. More importantly, they were afraid of becoming educated after watching their fellow citizens get persecuted throughout the existence of the Communist People�s Republic. Like so many other aspects of life, why should they bother spending time learning when it could only get them in trouble later? Who knew what political movement or ideology would govern people�s lives in the future?
I cannot stress enough that many individuals representing countless demographic groups were as strongly if not more affected than the Lost Generation. Still, it is important to talk about the different groups of society and their involvement in a movement such as the Cultural Revolution to avoid generalizations. Generalizations are helpful on a superficial level, but they often serve to discredit the positives or negatives of an individual experience. To truly understand the impact of the Cultural Revolution I feel it is critical to look beyond the accepted point of view and continually search for new perspectives and ideas, especially from first-hand experiences.
 
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