May 7 Directive
In a last political gamble to regain power after the failures of the Great Leap Forward, and Liu Shaoqi becoming a threat to his stranglehold on the CCP, on May 7 1966 Mao mobilised his youth paramilitary movement the Red Guards into action, calling for the destruction of anything deemed to be bourgeois, capitalist, traditionalist or Western cultural elements. He also appealed for them to be 'educated' by the peasants by relocating to the countryside. During this period, urban intellectual youths, whose entire lives had been lived under the CCP, were very much ideologically loyal to Mao and the CCP and it was regarded as the highest achievement to be a 'good' CCP activists. Hence (whether out of sincerity or out of wanting to seem active) many of the youths went about putting Mao's rhetoric into practice with tremendous zeal.
The 'zhiqing'
In 1968, two years into the Cultural Revolution, the relocation of urban youths (Red Guards but also many youths from the cities who had not yet finished secondary school) to the countryside in order to live with the peasants and be 'educated' by them, whilst simultaneously bettering the countryside too (it was also a matter of population reshuffling), started to be enforced compulsorily. These sent-down youths are referred to by the term zhiqing. The policy is sometimes called the 'Down to the countryside' movement or policy. Mao was quoted as saying "The intellectual youth must go to the country, and will be educated from living in rural poverty."
Many millions (17 million, Cornelius cites), aged 15 to 20, left their homes, families, and lives as university/school students to travel to the countryside as part of this process of 'rural re-education', where they worked with the workers and farmers of rural China. This movement can be seen as part of the recurring cycles of migration and population movement within China and Chinese history, but for this generation of youths (which included most if not all the Fifth Generation directors...) it was a formative and scarring experience. They witnessed realities in rural China which were very different from what their teachers and party officials had taught them. They experienced and lived through hardships alongside a working class people who were not happy under the Communist utopia as had the urban youths had made to believe, but rather were toiling and starving for very little reward other than bare survival. After the Cultural Revolution, a large number of them had no way back into city-life, had to stay in the countryside in poor conditions, were generally root-less, and many others had simply died during their stays. The scars left behind clearly informed and influenced the generation of writers and filmmakers that would break through in the 1980s, including the Scar literature movement, and of course the Fifth Generation directors.
"Most peasants did not welcome these city kids, who competed with them for limited resources despite their lack of basic farming skills. As marginalized individuals in marginalized regions, educated youth in exile were forced to reexamine their cultural center, which had been their home up to this point, as well as their former beliefs, implanted by the official educational system led by the Communist Party." [Lu Tonglin, 15]
Filmic representations
- Chen Kaige's 1987 film King of the Children, based on a novella by Ah Cheng, is directly set during the Cultural Revolution and its 'rural re-education' program.
- To Live ...
- The Blue Kite ...
- Farewell My Concubine ...
- Though I Am Gone (Documentary, 2006)
- Morning Sun (Documentary, 2003)
- Antonioni's Chung Kuo Cina was made during the CR but was strictly monitored by the Chinese government (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mGkGP1NOP0)
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