Beginning with Thomas Bernstein's pioneering work Up to the Mountains and Down to the Villages,Footnote ¹ the send-down movement (shangshan xiaxiang) has been the subject of a growing number of scholarly publications in English and Chinese languages. By offering a thorough analysis of how the different backgrounds of the participants in this movement shaped their individual memories of personal experiences and evaluations of the program, Bin Xu's book Chairman Mao's Children is a major step forward in the study of an event that reshaped the lives of millions in Maoist China and an important contribution to the study of the politics of memory in general.

The send-down movement started in the first half of the 1960s and culminated in 1968–78, involving more than seventeen million educated urban youth (known as zhiqing). The program was an unprecedented effort by the Maoist state to solve the problem of massive unemployment caused by the Cultural Revolution and to accelerate land reclamation and economic growth in the frontier provinces, despite its rhetoric of sending the youth to the countryside for “reeducation” by poor and lower-middle-class peasants. The send-down youth came from different backgrounds, ranging from the families of ordinary residents and revolutionary cadres, who had good class status and political standing (chushen), to those of former landlords, capitalists, reactionaries, and counterrevolutionaries, who were stigmatized and marginalized in Maoist society. When the program ended in 1979, most zhiqing returned to their home cities. Some of them succeeded and joined the ranks of the wealthy and powerful elite in the course of the economic reforms of the 1980s and 1990s, while many struggled with reemployment and survival at the bottom of society.

Xu is most successful in his nuanced and perceptive analysis of the key role of class in shaping the different experiences and memories of the zhiqing generation. He distinguishes between the zhiqing generation's “class in the present,” or their current socioeconomic positions in the reform era, and their “class in the past,” namely, the zhiqing's chushen, including their personal experiences before and after 1949. One of Xu's central arguments, which is fully explicated in chapters 1 and 2, is that the zhiqing's class in the present influenced their memories of personal experiences in the send-down movement, while their class in the past shaped their historical evaluations of the event. Thus, for instance, those who were successful in the reform era tended to have a positive memory of their past experiences as send-down youth, often linking their current success with what they had learned in the countryside, and those who had good chushen were likely to speak positively of the send-down movement. To substantiate his argument, Xu divides the zhiqing generation into four groups: “the faithful red” and “the indifferent red,” who had good chushen, and “the aspirants” and “the withdrawers,” who had middle to bad chushen. His analysis of these four groups centers on their respective inclinations or “habitus,” which were determined by their existing political or socioeconomic positions in society and, in turn, came to shape their different perceptions of the movement as well as their memories of personal experiences. Xu emphasizes that while the zhiqing's habitus was closely linked with one's class status and could be durable in one's life, it was subject to change when one encountered unexpected twists in personal careers or drastic reversals in the state's policies, as seen at the inception of the reform era; in both cases, the zhiqing's habitus about the send-down movement could change from positive to negative.

Chapter 3 discusses literary memories of the zhiqing generation, as seen in the many fictions and novels published in the late 1970s and the 1980s. As Xu convincingly demonstrates, a common theme in these writings is “good people but bad events.” The send-down project was generally depicted negatively in the zhiqing literature, in line with the post-Mao state's negation of Maoist legacies to legitimize the newly introduced reform policies. Nevertheless, the zhiqing authors invariably described their protagonists in the send-down movement as idealistic youth with moral integrity and lofty life goals, or at least as innocent and respectable victims. Behind this genre of writing, Xu contends, is the zhiqing generation's aspiration for public recognition of their past and their collective efforts to turn their past experiences in the send-down program into a new form of symbolic capital for enhancement and uplifting of their social standing.

In sharp contrast with “good people but bad events” was the new theme of “people but not the event” that prevailed in the 1990s among the zhiqing generation, which is at the core the Xu's arguments in the next three chapters. Chapter 4 examines two exhibits and three museums about the zhiqing experiences in the movement; chapter 5 focuses on the zhiqing's visits to the sites where they were sent down; and chapter 6 covers the zhiqing's group gatherings. In all these events, Xu argues, what was emphasized was the “people,” namely, the activities and memories of individual send-down youth and the pleasure that the participants found in these group events in the 1990s. But as Xu correctly points out, the “people” here means primarily those who were successful or those who were able to express themselves through writing or sponsoring such events; they do not include those who were victimized and marginalized during or after the movement. Thus, while the organizers and sponsors of the group events in the 1990s were able to build “the most common group memory” among the zhiqing generation by adhering to the theme of “people but not the event”—that is, avoiding any topics about a historical evaluation of the send-down movement—they chose to ignore or hide tensions and conflicts among the different zhiqing groups who had different class positions and ideologies, making any reflective and meaningful communications among them difficult, if not impossible.

As a sociological study of the memories of the zhiqing generation, this book is full of interesting findings and definitely advances the scholarship on the send-down movement. As a historian, I found that reading this book was both rewarding and challenging—challenging in that Xu's taxonomy of the four groups of the zhiqing generation makes the empirical evidence about them and the narratives thus built extremely fragmented and at times boring to read. In the end, I had to give up the idea of adding this title to my list of readings for a graduate seminar on contemporary China. As someone who has tried to make sense of peasant behavior in community undertakings, in particular why some villagers violated communal norms despite their verbal commitment to village rules, I found the analysis of peasant habitus very useful.Footnote ² Therefore, I would like to see more about Xu's analysis of exactly how the zhiqing's habitus shaped their behavior on an everyday basis; in the absence of such micro-level analysis, the term “habitus” in Xu's usage appears to be no more than just another word for political inclination or consciousness.