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  3. Educated Youth and the Cultural Revolution in China

Educated Youth and the Cultural Revolution in China

Martin Singer
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The Cultural Revolution was an emotionally charged political awakening for the educated youth of China. Called upon by aging revolutionary Mao Tse-tung to assume a "vanguard" role in his new revolution to eliminate bourgeois revisionist influence in education, politics, and the arts, and to help to establish proletarian culture, habits, and customs, in a new Chinese society, educated young Chinese generally accepted this opportunity for meaningful and dramatic involvement in Chinese affairs. It also gave them the opportunity to gain recognition as a viable and responsible part of the Chinese polity. In the end, these revolutionary youths were not successful in proving their reliability. Too "idealistic" to compromise with the bourgeois way, their sense of moral rectitude also made it impossible for them to submerge their factional differences with other revolutionary mass organizations to achieve unity and consolidate proletarian victories. Many young revolutionaries were bitterly disillusioned by their own failures and those of other segments of the Chinese population and by the assignment of recent graduates to labor in rural communes.

Educated Youth and the Cultural Revolution in China reconstructs the events of the Cultural Revolution as they affected young people. Martin Singer integrates material from a range of factors and effects, including the characteristics of this generation of youths, the roles Mao called them to play, their resentment against the older generation, their membership in mass organizations, the educational system in which they were placed, and their perception that their skills were underutilized. To most educated young people in China, Singer concludes, the Cultural Revolution represented a traumatic and irreversible loss of political innocence, made yet more tragic by its allegiance to the unsuccessful campaign of an old revolutionary to preserve his legacy from the inevitable storms of history.

  • Cover
  • Series Page
  • Title Page
  • Copyright
  • Contents
  • I. Introduction
    • Mao Tse-tung
    • Mao Tse-tung and the Youth of China
    • The State of Youth
    • Abbreviations Used in Text and Bibliography
  • II. The Cultural Revolution: 1966
    • Peking University
    • National Movement for Educational Reform
    • Leadership Support for Revolutionary Students
    • Early Mass Rallies and Movements
    • Recreating the Long March
    • Attempts to Disperse Students
    • Invocation of the Tradition of the PLA
    • Student Relations with Workers and Peasants
  • III. The Cultural Revolution: 1967
    • Attacks on Egoism
    • Attempts to Control Violence
    • The Three-Way Alliance
    • Attempts to Resume Classes: I
    • Responses to Changed Situations
    • Attempts to Resume Classes: II
    • Shift to the Left - April
    • Factionalism and Violent Struggle
    • Attempts to Resume Classes: III
    • The Wuhan Incident
    • Support the PLA
    • Crackdown on Young People
    • Attempts to Resume Classes: IV
    • Sheng Wu-lien
  • IV. The Cultural Revolution: 1968
    • Factionalism in Canton: I
    • Nod to the Left
    • Factionalism in Canton: II
    • Factionalism in Wuchow
    • Attempts to Resume Classes: V
    • Job Assignments
    • Violent Struggle
    • Anti-Intellectualism and Propaganda Teams
    • Consolidation of Workers' Teams' Positions
    • Downgrading of Pure Intellect
  • V. Educated Youth in Perspective
    • Characteristics
    • Roles
    • Resentment against the Older Generation
    • Membership in Mass Organizations
    • The Educational System
    • Underutilization of Skills of Young People
  • Footnotes
  • Bibliography
  • Series List
Open access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities / Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program
Citable Link
Published: 1971
Publisher: University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies
License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license
ISBN(s)
  • 978-0-472-90155-5 (open access)
  • 978-0-472-03814-5 (paper)
Series
  • Michigan Monographs in Chinese Studies
Subject
  • Asian Studies:China
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