Emily Honig's and Xiaojian Zhao's study of the sent-down youth movement in Shanghai adds another rich chapter to our understanding of one of the most complex and multi-layered aspects of China's Cultural Revolution. In a meticulously researched analysis of local archival materials and contemporary media reports, the authors trace the different stages of the movement from its inception in 1968. What some young students initially seemed to welcome for its revolutionary idealism rapidly unravelled under the combined reluctance, if not outright opposition, of parents, the Shanghai authorities empowered to administer the movement and rural hosts. The book is a gripping chronicle of the protracted demise of a movement which never really got off the ground. Its overall historical result, apparent almost from the outset, the authors argue, was to reinforce the divide between urban and rural sectors.

The sent-down youth movement had its precedent in the 1950s when large numbers of young people, intellectuals and professionals were sent to distant places, particularly Xinjiang. By the early 1960s many of those originally from Shanghai started demanding a reinstatement of their urban residence permits; some formed their own Red Guard rebel groups. Against the backdrop of the hardship endured by their predecessors, a sizeable number of young people not only did not volunteer to “go down” in 1968, but some, notably the working class and “sub-proletariat” of Shanghai's shantytowns, even refused to go. By the autumn of 1969 public sentencing meetings of youth began to take place in Shanghai.

The stage for the movement's failure was thus already in place. By 1971, with rising numbers of complaints, Shanghai youth were increasingly sent not to remote rural production teams but to state farms in the city's suburbs administered by the Shanghai authorities. While technically the movement continued throughout the 1970s, official attempts to respond to central policies by setting up “weiwentuan” (comfort teams) to manage the welfare of the sent-down youth and formulating locally-responsive alternatives, remind us that the reach of the central state was both limited and tenuous – a far cry from the idea of a monolithic system masterminded by an all-powerful ruler.

This book makes several new contributions to the already available literature. Firstly, this is the first published research about the sent-down youth movement to be based largely on local archival reports, revealing the strenuous attempts of local authorities to balance the needs of heeding central policy while also dealing with on the ground local complaints.

Its detailed analysis of the weiwentuan in itself marks a departure from other accounts, not only in that it produces new insights into the Shanghai government's active complicity in undermining the movement but in exposing an instance of the attempts by local government to be seen to adhere to central policy while at the same time coming up with alternatives to it.

Then, its analysis of the sexual abuse of female sent-down youth challenges the dominant post-Mao view that such abuse was due to the predatory behaviour of unscrupulous rural male cadres’ in victimizing innocent young urban women. Instead, the authors argue that the evidence about personal relationships in the areas to which youth were sent, covering dating, love, marriage and sexual encounters, further exposed the fundamental divide between urban and rural lives. In the early stages of the movement, liaisons between local people and urban youth, particularly young women, were subject to suspicion, moral condemnation and criticism. When a central directive, Document 21, was issued in 1973, such sexual relations were effectively criminalized. Local officials were slow to respond, so further documents were circulated to persuade rural cadres to take the campaign more seriously. Efforts were made to clarify that neither young urban men who had relationships with young urban women or with local women, nor rural cadres who used their position to abuse young urban women, would be targeted. Indeed, accusations of rape against local cadres were not upheld by local people who were unwilling to betray their own to support the case of people they regarded as “Shanghai barbarians.” Urban young women were undoubtedly vulnerable to assault in the countryside, but the criminalization of men who were not necessarily the assaulters made ordinary rural men “vulnerable to victimization by the state in the course of a cleanup campaign” (p. 115). The point is not to deny the abuse and violence but to underline the shifting power dynamic and how it was that ordinary local men became the fall guys for this aspect of the movement's failure. In the words of the authors, “the demonization of male peasants became emblematic of the impossibility of crossing the divide between urban and rural China” (p. 116).

Not all was gloom and doom, however, and despite the movement's failure to produce results that were commensurate with its claims, it nevertheless sometimes brought economic benefits to the countryside. This came not from the extra labour power of urban youth; their total lack of preparedness for rural labour meant that to their rural hosts, they were invariably a source of unwelcome demands. However, their urban connections with services and supplies brought not inconsiderable advantages to rural communities. For example, in one village, the building of an electrical wire factory was facilitated entirely by access to metals, transportation vehicles and government training services afforded by the connections of the families of the sent-down urban youth. Close personal ties built up between the youth, their families and their village hosts were often maintained over subsequent decades, indicating that the movement enabled rich personal affective experiences despite its systemic difficulties.

That the personal connections of the young people were a significant resource of training and technical support totally exposed the hollowness of the movement's intention to urge young urban people to learn from the peasants. Even the “worker-peasant-soldier” programme initially announced in 1970 was co-opted by the Shanghai authorities as a means of enabling sent-down youth to return home.

The final collapse of the programme with the massive protests of 1978 was therefore the culmination of a gradual process that the Shanghai (and possibly other) authorities had been trying to sustain against widespread resentment and opposition for the better part a decade. Mao's call for students to be re-educated by the peasants had become little more than empty rhetoric. Without adequate preparation, the experiment to transform social relations between urban and rural sectors was unable to withstand the extent of the “great divide” subordinating the rural to the needs and dictates of the urban.

In all, Honig's and Zhao's long-term collaboration and research have produced a remarkable addition to the available studies of the Cultural Revolution's sent-down youth movement. As an analysis based on rigorous interrogation of the local archives it is a welcome complement to the other accounts and memoirs of the period and should become obligatory reading for all students of Mao's China and its legacies.