Content area
Full Text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
The Lost Generation: The Rustication of China's Educated Youth (1968-1980) . By Michel Bonnin ; translated from French by Krystyna Horko . Hong Kong : Chinese University Press , 2013. xxix, 515 pp. $55.00 (cloth).
Book Reviews--China
This overdue English-language translation of Michel Bonnin's book about sent-down youth (published in French in 2004 and in Chinese in 2009) is an important contribution to the growing field of PRC history. Drawing on oral history interviews conducted in the late 1970s and mid-1980s, newspaper articles, literature, gazetteers, and collections of policy documents, Bonnin argues that the rustication of urban youth during the Cultural Revolution was a "massive waste of talent" (p. 426) that contributed to a broad decline in social morality in China.
Bonnin writes in a new preface that he was surprised at how difficult it was to publish an English translation. This is in part because the book is much longer than a standard English-language academic monograph. It also has an unorthodox structure. Bonnin opens with a fifty-page section about "motivations" for the sent-down youth movement, divided into three chapters about ideological, political, and socioeconomic motivations. Bonnin holds that sending urban youth to the countryside was driven more by Mao's political need to disband the Red Guards and his ideological goal of transforming young people through rural labor than it was about solving employment pressures.
The book's second part consists of four chapters detailing policy changes. This...