Chairman Mao's Children: Generation and the Politics of Memory in China by Bin Xu (review)

Reviewed by: Chairman Mao's Children: Generation and the Politics of Memory in China by Bin Xu Jack Neubauer Chairman Mao's Children: Generation and the Politics of Memory in China. By Bin Xu. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. xi + 274 pp. Hardcover 110. 00, paperback 29. 99. Many of the most prominent individuals in China today—from president Xi Jinping to film director Zhang Yimou—hail from a generation known as the zhiqing educated youth, a group of seventeen million urban young people who spent years laboring in the countryside during the 1960s and 1970s as part of a forced migration scheme known officially as the "Up to the Mountains and Down to the Villages Movement. " While the zhiqing had mostly returned home by the early 1980s, this "sent-down" generation's historical memory remains complicated and ambiguous. Were they heroes who sacrificed personal ambition for the good of the nation? Or victims whose lives were upended by an arbitrary government campaign? End Page 311 In Chairman Mao's Children: Generation and the Politics of Memory in China, Bin Xu systematically analyzes the historical memory of the zhiqing generation. Across six deeply researched chapters, Xu analyzes individual memories (Chapters 1–2), public memory in the realm of literature and museums (Chapters 3–4), and group memory as expressed through reunions and commemorative activities (Chapters 5–6). His central contention is that while individual memories vary widely, public memory has coalesced around a "remember the people but not the event" formulation that affirms the positive contributions of zhiqing while avoiding explicit evaluation of the send-down campaign itself. As Xu convincingly argues, this framing supports an upbeat narrative of China's progress by erasing the experiences of those still suffering from the dislocations of being sent down to the countryside and evading thorny questions about the zhiqing generation's complicity in the mass violence of the Mao era. Bin Xu is a sociologist who uses quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze an enormous body of data: 124 interviews, sixty-one ethnographic observations, and many textual sources. As a historian who does not use quantitative methods, I leave it to others to evaluate Xu's methods of data collection and analysis. Instead, this review focuses on what Xu's book has to offer the readers of this journal—historians of childhood and youth. Lest there be any confusion: this book is not about children, and historians are not its primary intended audience. Nevertheless, Xu's sophisticated approach to analyzing memory-based sources will be highly relevant to historians of childhood and youth, who often rely on similar materials. Xu begins by analytically separating life history narratives into two components: "personal experience" and "historical evaluation. " He argues that the most important factor determining how zhiqing evaluate their personal experience as sent-down youth is their class status in the present. In short, people who went on to successful careers positively evaluate their youthful struggles as a character-building experience that enabled their future success. On the other hand, Xu claims that individuals' historical evaluation of the send-down program is determined by their political habitus during the Mao era. Those who had a "good" class background and were politically active at the time generally have positive views of the program overall, even if it was ruinous for them personally. Xu's insightful analysis of how class and habitus shape memory will be instructive to historians using memory-based sources in their research. As a historian of modern China, I found the most compelling chapter of the book to be Chapter 2, in which Xu analyzes the memory patterns of zhiqing who still suffer from the repercussions of being sent down to the countryside. In contrast to high-status zhiqing who can plausibly narrate past hardship as End Page 312 contributing to present success, the stories told in this chapter have no such happy endings. For example, Xu recounts the story of Mr. Zhou, who spent decades as a farmworker in Xinjiang and as of 2014 lived in a Shanghai slum in a tiny rented room with no toilet (73–6). Stories like these are especially important because the voices of the millions. . .