China's Lost Generation

In the late 1970s, an entire cohort of Chinese college students—the “worker-peasant-soldier” students recruited and trained during the Cultural Revolution decade (1966-1976)—were officially stigmatized as a lost generation. A prolonged, collective status degradation ceremony decisively lowered their social standing and reduced their life chances. Subsequent cooling out processes sought to reincorporate them into their lowered statuses with a minimum of complaint. This article traces what Goffman would call the “natural history” of this suddenly stigmatized status and analyses the adaptive strategies available to stigmatized individuals within the constraints of contemporary Chinese social organization.