No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Bury Me With My Comrades: Memorializing Mao's Sent-Down Youth
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2025
Abstract
Over the last decade or so, China has seen an unprecedented building boom of museums and memorials. One curious new genre is the museums for Mao-era “Cultural Revolution” youth “sent down” to the countryside by Mao during the 1960s and 1970s. After Mao's death, they struggled to return to the cities. Surviving returnees have recently established several museums commemorating their suffering and sacrifice, even though the topic is politically fraught and the period's history is strictly censored in official museums and histories. One museum, the Shanghai Educated Youth Museum, doubles as a memorial site and a collective cemetery for former sent-down youth who wish to be buried together. This paper locates these memorials and burial grounds in their historical and political context. It also reflects the Shanghai institutions' copying of the design and architecture of the Korea and Vietnam war memorials in Washington D.C.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Authors 2018
References
Cheng, Ah. 2017. “On Listening to Enemy Radio.” Translated by Yurou Zhong. MCLC Resource Center, July 2017.Google Scholar
Baidu, , n.d. Ningbo zhiqing bowuguan 宁波知青博物馆 [Ningbo Educated Youth Museum].Google Scholar
Tieba, Baidu. 2011. Shanghai zhiqing bowuguan 上海知青博物馆 [Shanghai Educated Youth Museum].Google Scholar
Bernstein, Thomas P. 1977. Up to the Mountains and Down to the Villages. London: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Bonnin, Michel. 2013. The Lost Generation: The Rustication of China's Educated Youth (1968-1980). Translated by Horko, Krystyna. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cai, Shenshen. 2016. “Contemporary Chinese TV Serials: Configuring Collective Memory of Socialist Nostalgia via the Cultural Revolution.” Visual Anthropology 29 (1): 22–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cao, Zuoya. 2003. Out of the Crucible: Literary Works about the Rusticated Youth. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2003.Google Scholar
座 知 青 文 化 园 " — 知 青 缘 博 物 馆 [“The Township with the Most Beautiful Environment, Banli Township, ‘the Nation's First Cultural Garden of the Educated Youth,‘ the Links Between Educated Youth Museum”]. 2013-04-12, 08:51.Google Scholar
County, Chongming. 2017. 崇明的沧桑岁月 [“Glorious Times of Chongming”]. [Incl. photo of Educated Youth Memorial Wall [知 青 纪 念 墙].Google Scholar
Denton, Kirk. 2014. Exhibiting the Past: Historical Memory & the Politics of Museums in Postsocialist China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.Google Scholar
Dikötter, Frank. 2016. The Cultural Revolution: A People's History, 1962-1976. New York: Bloomsbury Press.Google Scholar
Esherick, Joseph; Pickowicz, Paul; and Walder, Andrew. 2006. The Chinese Cultural Revolution as History. Stanford: Stanford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fiskesjö, Magnus. 2015. “The Museum Boom in China and the State Efforts to Control History.” Review essay. Museum Anthropology Review 9 (2): 96–105.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fiskesjö, Magnus. 2017. “The Return of the Show Trial: China's Televised ‘Confessions.’” Asia- Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 15.13.1.Google Scholar
Frank, Joshua. 2014. “Collecting Insanity.” Film about the Jianchuan Museum Cluster, posted at ChinaFile.com.Google Scholar
Gao, Qian. 2013. “Hard History, Soft Story: Resistance in a Nostalgic Key.” Modern China Studies 20 (1): 45–63.Google Scholar
The Globe and Mail, 2018. “China steps up internet censorship of criticism of Xi Jinping.” By Nathan Vanderklippe. 11 March 2018.Google Scholar
Gold, Thomas B. 1980. “Back to the City: The Return of Shanghai's Educated Youth.” China Quarterly 84: 755–770.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gu Hongzhang 顾洪章 et al, eds. 2009. Zhongguo zhishi qingnian shangshan xiaxiang shimo 中国知识青年上山下乡始末 [Origins and history of China's educated youth going up the mountains and down to the countryside]. Beijing: Zhongguo jiancha chubanshe (orig. Renmin ribao chubanshe, 1996).Google Scholar
Hille, Kathrin. 2013. “China's ‘sent-down’ youth.” Financial Times Magazine, September 20, 2013.Google Scholar
Honig, Emily. 2003. “Socialist Sex: The Cultural Revolution Revisited.” Modern China 29 (2): 143–175.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Honig, Emily and Zhao, Xiaojian. 2015. “Sent-down Youth and Rural Economic Development in Maoist China.” China Quarterly 222, 499–521.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hubbert, Jennifer. 2005. “Revolution Is a Dinner Party: Cultural Revolution Restaurants in Contemporary China.” China Review [Hong Kong] 5 (2): 125–150.Google Scholar
Hubbert, Jennifer. 2006. “(Re)collecting Mao: Memory and Fetish in Contemporary China.” American Ethnologist 33 (2): 145–161.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hung, Ruth Y.Y. 2015. “Red Nostalgia: Commemorating Mao in Our Time.” Literature Compass 12 (8), 371–384.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shaowu, Jiang, n.d. “Years, memories.” Photography collection. In Popular History 民间历史, issued by the Center for Chinese Studies, Chinese University of Hong Kong; quoting from the website Kaidi [《岁月·记忆》—蒋少武作品欣赏. 香港中文大学中国研究服务中心, 转自凯迪网站]. (Also duplicated here.)Google Scholar
Kaufman, Jason Edward. 2008. “China Bans Loans to Show on Cultural Revolution: The Asia Society is Told the Subject is too Sensitive in Olympic Year.” The Art Newspaper, Issue 194 (20.8.08).Google Scholar
Kiernan, Ben. 2008. The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia Under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-79. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Li, Li. 2010. “Uniformed Rebellion, Fabricated Identity: A Study of Social History of Red Guards in Military Uniforms During the Chinese Cultural Revolution and Beyond.” Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture 14 (4): 439–470.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pan, Yihong. 2003. Tempered in the Revolutionary Furnace: China's Youth in the Rustication Movement. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pan, Yihong. 2006. “Revelation of the Grassland: The Han Sent-Down Youths in Inner Mongolia in China's Cultural Revolution.” Asian Ethnicity 7.3, 225–241.Google Scholar
Leys, Simon. The Chairman's New Clothes: Mao and the Cultural Revolution. London; New York: Allison & Busby, rev. ed. 1981 (1st ed. 1977).Google Scholar
Liu Xiaomeng 刘小萌. 1995. Zhongguo zhiqing shidian 中国知青事典 [Encyclopedia of China's sent-down youth]. Chengdu: Sichuan renmin chubanshe.Google Scholar
Liu Xiaomeng 刘小萌. 2004. Zhongguo zhiqing koushu shi 中国知青口述史 [Oral histories of China's sent-down youth]. Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe.Google Scholar
Liu Xiaomeng 刘小萌. 2009. Zhongguo zhiqingshi: da chao 1966-1980 nian 中国知青史: 大潮 1966-1980 年 [History of China's sent-down youth: The great surge, 1969-1980]. Beijing: Dangdai Zhongguo chubanshe.Google Scholar
MacFarquhar, Roderick, and Schoenhals, Michael. 2006. Mao's Last Revolution. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Movius, Lisa. 2016. “Long Museum Chongqing tackles Cultural Revolution with rare show of paintings: Decade of terror remains a highly sensitive subject in China, but that may now be changing.” The Art Newspaper, July 18, 2016.Google Scholar
Pang, Laikwan. 2017. The Art of Cloning: Creative Production During China's Cultural Revolution. London: Verso.Google Scholar
People.com.cn. 2010. 上海首家知青关爱基金启动: 三千多位老知青相聚上海知青广场. [Launch of Shanghai Educated Youth Guan'ai Foundation with over 3000 old educated youth gathering at the Shanghai Educated Youth Plaza]. 2010-11-13.Google Scholar
Rene, Helena K. China's Sent-Down Generation: Public Administration and the Legacies of Mao's Rustication Program. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2013.Google Scholar
Rosen, Stanley. The Role of Sent-Down Youth in the Chinese Cultural Revolution: The Case of Guangzhou. University of California, Berkeley, Center for Chinese Studies, 1981.Google Scholar
Scharping, Thomas. 1981. Umsiedlungsprogramme für Chinas Jugend 1955-1980: Probleme der Stadt-LandBeziehungen in der chinesischen Entwicklungspolitik. Hamburg: Institut für Asienkunde.Google Scholar
Scharping, Thomas. 1984. Review of Stanley Rosen, The Role of Sent-Down Youth in the Chinese Cultural Revolution: The Case of Guangzhou (University of California, Berkeley, Center for Chinese Studies, 1981). The China Quarterly 97, 138–139.Google Scholar
South China Morning Post. July 19, 2015. By Li Jing. “Controversy Stirs Over Beijing Exhibition On ‘Farm Re-Education’ Policy: Exhibition Looks at the Controversial Policy Of Sending Millions Of Youths To The Countryside.”Google Scholar
Tatlow, Didi Kirsten. “Fate Catches Up to a Cultural Revolution Museum in China.” New York Times, Oct. 2, 2016.Google Scholar
Tyner, James A. 2017. From Rice Fields to Killing Fields: Nature, Life, And Labor Under the Khmer Rouge. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wang, Yanjie. 2011. “The ‘Sent-Down’ Vision: Poetics and Politics of Zhiqing Literature in Post- Mao China.” PhD dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.Google Scholar
Wang, Youqin. 2007. Finding a Place for the Victims: The Problem in Writing the History of the Cultural Revolution. China Perspectives 72 (4): 65–74.Google Scholar
Wang, Youqin. n.d. Memorial for Victims of the Chinese Cultural Revolution – Chinese Holocaust Memorial.Google Scholar
Yang, Bin. 2009. “‘We Want to Go Home!‘— The Great Petition of the Zhiqing, Xishuangbanna, Yunnan, 1978-1979.” China Quarterly 198 (2009), 401–421. (See too expanded Chinese version, “宁可杀头，也要回家—1978-1979年西双版纳知青大请愿述评” in Modern China Studies 當代中國研究 20 (1):2013, 99-140.)Google Scholar
Yang, Guobin. 2003. “China's Zhiqing Generation: Nostalgia, Identity, and Cultural Resistance in the 1990s.” Modern China 29 (3): 267–296.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Yang, Guobin. 2016. The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Yang, Wenqi, and Yan, Fei. 2017. “The annihilation of femininity in Mao's China: Gender inequality of sent-down youth during the Cultural Revolution.” China Information 31.1, 63–83.Google Scholar
Yododo.com. 2012. 见证北大荒开拓史—爱辉知青博物馆—黑河旅游攻略 [Witness to the opening up of the vast Northeast. Aihui Zhiqing bowuguan, Strategy for sightseeing in Heihe]. 2012年 11 月 29 日.Google Scholar
Yue, Ming-Bao. 2005. “Nostalgia for the Future: Cultural Revolution Memory in Two Transnational Chinese Narratives.” China Review 5 (2): 43–63.Google Scholar
Zhang Nuanxin, director. 1985. Qing chun ji 青 春 祭 [Sacrificed youth]. 92 minutes. Beijing: Qingnian dianying zhipianchang. (Sometimes translated as Rite of youth; or, misspelled as Jing chun ji).Google Scholar
bowuguan, Zhiqing [Educated Youth Museum, Aihui town, Heihe city, Heilongjiang Province] [黑龙江省黑河市爱辉镇 知青博物馆]. n.d.Google Scholar