How Cultural Revolution Resources Transferred to the Reform Era: The Social Paths of Former Red Guards and Rusticated Youth

The Red Guard movement (1966-1968) and the Rustication movement of “educated youth” (1968-1980) are two of the main mass movements that are part of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (later CR). This paper focuses on the social paths of former participants in one or both of these movements from their mobilization to the return to the cities and eventual retirement. At present, this group has spent on average their first thirty years during their youth in the “socialist era” and the next thirty years in the “reform era” which took a radically different stance. Macro-level biographical consequences of CR movements on participants such as life-cycle consequences (later marriages, single children, etc.), education and employment consequences (weak education credentials, large proportions of laid-off workers) are now well known (Deng and Treiman, 1997; Zhou and Hou, 1999; Xie, Jiang and Greenman, 2008). We provide another viewpoint on these consequences by studying the connection between both eras and the transferability of some resources, in order to understand the discrepancy in social paths taken after the CR. Former student leaders' writing abilities and political perceptiveness were described to me as assets in professional career development in the reform era. Yet other participants pertaining similar resources were stuck at the bottom of the social ladder for lacking of the appropriate “family origin” (chushen) credentials in the files, or for having participated at some point in “counter-revolutionary activities”. The question is therefore to understand how some resources or stigmata related specifically to one era can be transferred to another and who are the winners and losers of such transfers in periods of great uncertainty. Intersectionality and giving light to the evolving political meaning of resources and stigmata are essential in understanding the diversity of former participants' redeployment and social paths. This paper is based on extensive interview footage conducted in Chinese between 2009 and 2014 with former participants of both movements having returned to the cities of Shanghai and Chengdu. This includes interviewees of various “family origins”, who participated to different degrees in one or both movements. We compare the redeployment paths of such sub-groups as former student leaders, participants of “bad family origin” (chushen bu hao) and also active participants in the South-West Yunnan province educated youth movement to return to the cities which took a nationwide magnitude in 1979. Thus, we provide insight on the way former participants adjusted to economic reforms and to the continuous increase in inequalities since the end of the CR, and describe what was called a “lost generation” (Bonnin, 2013) in a nuanced and multifaceted perspective. References Michel Bonnin, The Lost Generation: The Rustication of China' Educated Youth (1968-1980), Hong Kong, The Chinese University Press, 2013. Deng Zhong, Donald J. Treiman, “The Impact of the Cultural Revolution on Trends in Educational Attainment in the People's Republic of China”, American Journal of Sociology, n° 103, 1997. Yu Xie, Yang Jiang, Emily Greenman, “Did Sent-Down Experience Benefit Youth? A Reevaluation of the Social Consequences of Forced Urban-rural Migration during China's Cultural Revolution”, Social Science Research, n°37, 2008. Zhou Xueguang, Hou Liren, “Children of the Cultural Revolution: The State and the Life Course in the People’s Republic of China”, American Sociological Review, 64 (1), 1999.