Join us via Zoom: http://bit.ly/EACTalks (Zoom ID: 925 5728 2471)
Of all the political campaigns that reconfigured daily life in the first three decades of the People’s Republic of China, the “sent-down youth” movement that sent 17 million urban youth to live in rural China from 1968-1980 is one of the most vividly remembered and hotly debated. Reflected in popular and scholarly literature, the victimization of sent-down youth has been invoked to symbolize the suffering of all Chinese people during the Cultural Revolution.
Based on investigation files—texts of accusations, confessions, investigative reports, and sentencing records--from rural county archives in China, Professor Zhao will discuss how a campaign triggered by a state directive in 1973 was launched to pressure local officials to identify, expose, and investigate individuals who “harmed sent-down youth,” and how the investigation campaign ultimately created a stereotypical image of villagers as abusers who were unfit to host, let alone educate, urban youth.
Bio: Xiaojian Zhao is a professor of the Department of Asian American Studies at UC Santa Barbara. She is the author of several books, including the award winning Remaking Chinese America: Immigration, Family and Community (2001). Her most recent book, Across the Great Divide: China’s Sent-Down Youth Movement (with Emily Honig) was published by Cambridge University Press in 2019.
Bio: Xiaojian Zhao is a professor of the Department of Asian American Studies at UC Santa Barbara. She is the author of several books, including the award winning Remaking Chinese America: Immigration, Family and Community (2001). Her most recent book, Across the Great Divide: China’s Sent-Down Youth Movement (with Emily Honig) was published by Cambridge University Press in 2019.