Yarong Jiang - Maos Children in the New China: Voices From the Red Guard Generation

In this inspiring collection of interviews with former Red Guards, members of the first generation to be born under Chairman Mao talk frankly about the dramatic changes that have occurred in China over the last two decades. In discussing the impact these changes have had on their own lives, the former revolutionaries give a direct insight into how they view both the past and the present, revealing an attitude perhaps more contradictory and critical than that of most western commentators.

These poignant memoirs tell the very personal stories of how people from all walks of life were affected by Maos Cultural Revolution and Deng Xiaopings economic reforms. They cover topics as diverse as politics, party leadership, nationalism, marriage and divorce, the privatization of industry, family relationships, education and the stock market. Maos Children in the New China is essential reading for all those interested in learning more about modern China.

Yarong Jiang is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Wyoming, USA. Her previous publications include Sociology: An Introduction with Shuqi Peng (Zhejiang Peoples Publishing House, 1990), as well as various articles for Chinese newspapers and journals. David Ashley is Professor of Sociology at the University of Wyoming. His previous publications include Sociological Theory with David M. Orenstein (Allyn and Bacon, 2000), History Without a Subject: The Postmodern Condition (Westview, 1997), and numerous articles on social theory and political sociology for scholarly journals in the UK, USA and Canada.

Routledge Studies in Asias Transformations
Edited by Mark Selden
Binghamton and Cornell Universities

The books in this series explore the political, social, economic and cultural consequences of Asias twentieth-century transformations. The series emphasizes the tumultuous interplay of local, national, regional and global forces as Asia bids to become the hub of the world economy. While focusing on the contemporary, it also looks back to analyse the antecedents of Asias contested rise.

This series comprises two strands:

Routledge Studies in Asias Transformations is a forum for innovative research intended for a high-level specialist readership, and the titles will be available in hardback only. Titles include:

1. The American Occupation of Japan and Okinawa
Literature and Memory
Michael Molasky

2. Koreans in Japan
Critical Voices from the Margin
Edited by Sonia Ryang

Asias Transformations aims to address the needs of students and teachers, and the titles will be published in hardback and paperback. Titles include:

Debating Human Rights
Critical Essays from the United States and Asia
Edited by Peter Van Ness

Hong Kongs History
State and Society under Colonial Rule
Edited by Tak-Wing Ngo

Chinese Society
Change, Conflict and Resistance
Edited by Elizabeth J. Perry and Mark Selden

Maos Children in the New China
Voices from the Red Guard Generation
Yarong Jiang and David Ashley

Voices from the Red Guard Generation

Yarong Jiang and David Ashley

First published 2000
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2000 Yarong Jiang and David Ashley

Typeset in Sabon by Taylor & Francis Books Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data
Maos children in the new China: voices from the Red Guard
generation / Yarong Jiang and David Ashley
p. cm.
Includes index.

1. China Public opinion. 2. Public opinion China Shanghai. 3. Hung wei ping Interviews. I. Title. II. Voices from the Red Guard generation. II. Jiang, Yarong. III. Ashley, David.

DS706.C5114 2000
951.05dc21 99049313

ISBN 041522330x (hbk)
ISBN 0415223318 (pbk)

ISBN - 978 0 4152 2330 0 (hbk)

On youth

The world is yours, as well as ours, but in the last analysis it is yours. You young people, full of vigour and vitality, are in the bloom of life, like the sun at eight or nine in the morning. Our hope is placed on you .

(Mao Zedong, Talk at a meeting with Chinese students and trainees in
Moscow, November 17, 1957, in Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung,
New York: Bantam, 1976, p. 165)

PART I
Authors introductory remarks

PART II
The interviewees

Stanley Rosen

Oral histories, autobiographies and fictional accounts of the Red Guard generation have been appearing in China and the West since the 1970s. Far from abating, however, the outpouring of literature and film on this period seems to have gained momentum in the 1990s. Chinese participants in the Cultural Revolution (19661976) and its attendant Up to the Mountains and Down to the Villages movement (shangshan xiaxiang yundong) (which lasted until 1978) have fascinated western readers and audiences with harrowing tales of their experiences in those years.

While Jung Chang was describing three generations of oppression, not just her own personal suffering during the Cultural Revolution, Anchee Mins Red Azalea another bestselling personal memoir from the 1990s is limited to her own experiences as a Red Guard and sent-down youth. If anything, Mins account is even more harrowing, as well as titillating. As a Red Guard she denounces her beloved teacher as a reactionary, thus putting that womans life in danger. Sent to the countryside she toils in near-starvation while fighting off leeches. Not allowed contact with the opposite sex she has a passionate lesbian affair with her squad leader, constantly aware that discovery could mean execution. More adventures both political and sexual follow, as Min becomes the star of Madam Maos opera Red Azalea. The New York Times chose Red Azalea as a Notable Book and observed that it told the true story of what it was like growing up in Maos China, where the soul was secondary to the state, beauty was mistrusted, and love could be punishable by death. The national advertisements used by the publisher Pantheon emphasized these same points, noting, again quoting the New York Times, how this remarkable story revealed both the brutality of oppression and the incredible resilience of the human spirit. Readers, to judge from comments on the Amazon.com website, had similar feelings. One noted how the book helped him understand communism much better, while another found it incredible to think these atrocities occurred in our lifetime [It] makes you feel grateful to be residing in the United States.