An Academic Conference No One Wanted to Publicize, and a Subject Growing More Urgent by the Day

Is it the elephant in the room, or a generation's fate finally taken seriously? Even that starting question is unsettled.

Michel Bonnin was coming to Shanghai for a conference.

He is a French sinologist who speaks fluent Chinese, currently a professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in France and a visiting professor at the Centre for China Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

In 1973, curious about China, Bonnin arrived in Hong Kong meaning to study contemporary Confucianism. Instead, at the place he was renting, he met educated youth who had fled the mainland across the border. Their stories gave him a way to glimpse a country that had until then stayed closed to him.

Before Bonnin, the American writer Thomas Bernstein had already gone some way toward setting the foreign view of China's educated youth, in his book Up to the Mountains and Down to the Villages: The Transfer of Youth from Urban to Rural China — a movement, as he described it, meant to "relieve the social pressures of urban overcrowding and rising urban unemployment."

Bonnin thought there was more to it than that. He spent over 30 years on the subject, interviewing countless educated youth and calling on many of the scholars who studied them, cross-checking a large body of documents to make sure his material held up. In 2004 he published the French edition of The Lost Generation: The Rustication of China's Educated Youth (1968-1980), followed by a Hong Kong edition in 2009 and a mainland edition in 2010.

For a while, Bonnin was one of my interview subjects. He had already confirmed he would attend a conference at Fudan University — a conference with no public agenda and no detailed announcement. Nothing about it could be found on the website of Fudan's History Department either.

The only certainty was that it was an academic conference, and that its subject was China's educated youth.

1968 was the turning point for the Down to the Countryside Movement. The movement had been under way in various places since 1955, but in 1968 the number of young people sent to the countryside hit its peak, driven by Mao Zedong's "December 21" directive.

Over the 12 years from 1968 to 1979, about 16.5 million educated youth were sent down; adding those sent before 1968 brings the total to nearly 20 million. Count their families and children and the number of people touched runs far higher.

By its impact, by the number of people it swept up, by its place in history, the largest mass migration of modern times should count as a big subject. The conference, though, kept a very low profile.

"If you're from Fudan, just come and listen." Three days before it opened, QDaily asked the organizers whether the event was public. They said they had talked it over beforehand and decided not to put the announcement on the official website or promote it in any way.

Jin Guangyao, a professor in Fudan's History Department and one of the organizers, later said preparations had started the previous September, with invitation letters sent to scholars in China and abroad. Four bodies co-hosted: Fudan's History Department, the research group for a major National Social Science Fund project, the Shanghai Educated Youth Administrative Cadre College, and the Shanghai Research Association for the History and Culture of Educated Youth.

By any measure this was a big event. No one wanted to publicize it.

The last time Jin Guangyao and Jin Dalu, a researcher at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, organized one was ten years earlier, in 2008.

On December 21 and 22 that year, Fudan's History Department and the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences held the "2008 Academic Conference on Educated Youth." It marked 40 years since China's Down to the Countryside Movement and 30 years since the nationwide return-to-the-cities movement, which had begun with educated youth on the Xishuangbanna reclamation farms in Yunnan.

"We held the first academic conference on educated youth in 2008. One result was a collection of essays, and now we're putting together a second one," Jin Dalu said, explaining why they were meeting again a decade later.

That conference did not go as smoothly as expected. "Almost every scholar at the 2008 conference had been an educated youth. Their experiences differed so widely that it shaped their attitudes and their arguments, and they quarrelled without end. That's why we limited the size of this one," a member of the organizing staff told QDaily.

In 2015, "The Collection, Organization, and Study of Historical Materials on the Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside Movement of Educated Youth" became a major project of the National Social Science Fund — China's first national-level research project on educated youth. Jin Guangyao was the project's chief expert, Jin Dalu the head of one of its sub-projects.

Many well-known scholars in the field joined it, including Liu Xiaomeng and Ding Yizhuang, both researchers at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and among the first generation to study the movement. They believed the project would help the study of contemporary history, and they called for historical materials to be verified and made public.

Under the project's plan, the first three years would concentrate on "historical materials on educated youth," above all the collection and organization of archival records. Members were expected to make academic contributions — holding conferences in China and abroad, or publishing research, including Selected Archival Documents on Shanghai Educated Youth in Jiangxi, From "Activity" to "Movement": A Historical Study of the Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside Movement of Educated Youth in Jiangxi, and A Personal Reading of the Stratification of Educated Youth in Beijing and Shanghai during the Cultural Revolution.

The 2018 conference was itself one of the project's outputs, arriving right at the three-year mark. It was called "New Historical Materials, New Perspectives: An Academic Conference on the Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside Movement and Educated Youth."

1.

On June 22, the conference opened as scheduled.

An academic conference is a dense format — one presentation every 20 minutes. Over two days there were 23 of them.

It was held in a seminar room in Fudan's Guanghua Tower. The room was small, and the 40-odd people who turned up on the day filled it. They included 32 scholars, three graduate students, ten former educated youth who came to sit in, and a handful of other visitors.

Most of the former educated youth sat around the edges of the room. Some of them set about documenting the proceedings, taking photos or shooting video.

The organizers wanted a strong atmosphere of academic discussion, so they left plenty of time for the scholars to debate. Before the conference began they explained the rules to the former educated youth: as far as possible, the time belongs to the scholars.

That reminder did not sit well with some of them.

Around 10:30 a.m. on June 23, during the tea break after the first panel of the second morning, a former educated youth named Zhou Gongzheng stood up from his seat at the edge of the room and told Jin Dalu he was leaving.

Pointing at the "list of participating scholars" in the conference booklet, Zhou pulled a 100-yuan note from his pocket and said he wanted to pay back the cost of the boxed lunch he had eaten the day before. In Shanghainese, he said: "I'll put it bluntly — we educated youth are here to make up the numbers."

The two argued for nearly 20 minutes, from the meeting room all the way to the elevator, and drew little attention: most people were inside the room or out in the hallway, discussing the previous panel with other scholars. One former educated youth walked past the pair, said flatly, "We're used to it by now," and went back in.

Jin Dalu kept trying to talk Zhou round, insisting the former educated youth would get their turn to speak in the second half. Zhou did go back into the seminar room, but less than two hours later he left again, at the lunch break.

Conferences like this often produce a clash of this kind.

Before he left, Zhou told QDaily: "I have nothing against Jin Dalu. I'm just a former educated youth attending this conference the way anyone would. Society as a whole has pushed us to the margins. I value this research — it's the only thing that can give educated youth a fair assessment — but we get used. They call on us when they need us."

"Take the medical-discharge subject. Nobody has more right to speak on it than I do," Zhou added.

The medical-discharge subject he meant was one of the topics on the second day: "Illness and Manufactured Illness: The Evolution of Shanghai's Policy on Medical Discharge for Educated Youth," presented by Zhu Wenjing, a teacher at Shanghai No. 3 Girls' High School.

Over the two days there were seven panels, each with three or four speakers. The topics covered problems of the post-educated-youth era, the motives and causes behind the movement, the relationship between educated youth and the villages they lived in, educated youth in the border region of Fujian, Guangdong, and Jiangxi, oral histories, the aesthetics of educated youth, and marriage among educated youth.

On the agenda, senior scholars and younger speakers were generally put in separate panels.

Academic research and personal experience are hard to reconcile. Xu Bin, an assistant professor of sociology at Emory University, raised the question of memory versus history: "Many people in this room have lived through it themselves, and that has its upside — when scholarship and popular experience blur together, the research travels faster. But there's a second effect. Once this generation's sense of its own place overlaps with the academic agenda, the subject starts to look narrow. It becomes something consumed by a niche."

2.

In 2015, Deng Xiaomang, a professor in Wuhan University's Department of Philosophy, took questions for a column called "I Want to Ask the Scholars" on the website Consensus Net. One question about the Down to the Countryside Movement went: "Sending educated youth to the countryside brought scientific, technical, and cultural knowledge to vast rural areas, and gave agricultural development new life and vitality."

Deng answered: "If you still believe the Down to the Countryside Movement brought cultural knowledge to the countryside, it shows you've only learned about the movement from official rhetoric. ... Everything you're saying is exactly what was used to trick us into going down there. We saw through it long ago. I never imagined the next generation would take up the same line. It's lucky we're still alive — otherwise there'd be no one left to contradict it."

Even at an academic conference, that feeling — that once the witnesses are gone, no one can contradict what is said — still runs strong.

Zhu Shenglei, 60, came both days. Every time he heard a young researcher present, he would turn to whoever was beside him and add: "That's not how it was."

Zhu is from Shanghai. He was sent to Shanxi in 1970 and spent seven years there. Because of that background he takes an active part in events like this one. "I don't want to say too much, but some of their ideas are wrong. It's lucky we're still here, or there'd be no one left to contradict it — that's the problem with the younger researchers. They only look at the data. It's not good," Zhu told QDaily.

Again, this is the gap between academic research and personal experience. With so little material publicly available, worry and suspicion about the shortage of sources tend to generate noise for historical research.

Qin Hui, a professor in Tsinghua University's Department of History, raised an episode outsiders know little about: the Yangwu educated youth and the "4-22" massacre in Nanning, Guangxi.

"When Yangwu was at the height of its fame, the reportage piece Deep Roots, Lush Leaves didn't contain a single word about it. If we don't explain what Yangwu actually was, people in the future will never know," Qin said. "There was a great deal of reporting on the educated-youth movement then, and people take one of two opposite views of it. If you believe it, you think of those as years of burning passion. If you don't believe the propaganda, you think those people would do anything to get ahead politically — the so-called political darlings. But I suspect the truth lies outside both."

Across the two days, many scholars raised the problem of sources. It is true that new material can easily produce findings that overturn the old ones — and just as easily drag the discussion into logical disputes that are hard to settle.

Ye Qing, a professor at Fujian Normal University's School of Social History, said: "Collecting historical materials has been hard for us — harder than I expected. As far as I can tell, it's all right for educated youth to be treated as a major subject; that side of it feels fine for now. But touch the Cultural Revolution and it's still sensitive."

3.

Because material is missing, some of the logic of the educated-youth movement remains unsettled — the motives behind it, for one. Deng Jie, a lecturer at Fudan's School of Marxism, put the question this way: "We find the dominant explanation now is ideological — that it was about education reform. But that leaves a logical problem: why the countryside rather than a factory? There's also the explanation that it solved urban employment, but in that case there were at least two paths available, and at least one of them could have raised urban employment instead."

Bonnin sees it differently. He does not think economic motives were the main cause: "This question is still being argued over, and it will go on being argued over. My own view is that it was a political movement."

Zheng Qian, a researcher at the Party History and Literature Research Institute of the CPC Central Committee, believes only a command of the sources allows a proper analysis of the movement. "The narrative of the educated youth will pass from the older generation into the hands of the young. They haven't lived it. What they face are historical documents and literary works. They won't have the intense firsthand experience we have, so their research is bound to differ from ours. Educated-youth studies will diversify."

Jin Dalu named one clear change over the past decade: "Less reliance on literary works — a sign the field is shifting from literature toward history."

Ding Yizhuang, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said: "A lot of past research liked to draw on literary works, but I think those can only represent a small slice of the educated youth. In this field we often treat novels as academic material, which is unusual. It rarely happens in the study of other movements. In educated-youth studies it happens a great deal."

Of the field as a whole, Xu Bin said: "This isn't a subject about history. It's a subject about memory."

The opening of local archives has long been a problem for research on contemporary Chinese history, and Bonnin ran into it too. He drew on a great deal of published newspaper and periodical material, local gazetteers, statistical yearbooks, and literary works, then cross-checked all of it against oral-history interviews, which is how he managed a relatively complete analysis.

One young researcher said that while searching the archives he had indeed run into records closed to the public, though he had still dug up a fair amount of new material. Because the archives are closed, he had no way of knowing what records might be available at all.

Another young researcher at the event said: "Every core figure in educated-youth studies today, everyone whose work gets cited most, is here." At each tea break she made a point of using the time to talk to scholars doing related work.

Bonnin, who had also attended the conference a decade earlier, compared the two: "There were more people sitting in back then, and as I remember it they talked a lot about their own experiences during the Q&A, and there were some fairly sharp conflicts among them. This time the organizers succeeded in protecting the atmosphere of academic discussion."

In 2008, nearly 80 of the most representative scholars of educated-youth studies from China and abroad took part. According to media reports at the time, "this is the most influential theoretical conference on China's Down to the Countryside Movement held in China in 40 years."

That said, the roster of scholars at the two conferences was not all that different.

At 6 p.m. on June 23, 2018, the moment this year's conference came to a close, the organizing staff finally posted photos and notes from the event to their WeChat Moments. Only then did many people learn that Fudan University had held an academic conference like this over the weekend.

Graphics: Feng Xiuxia, Wang Kaiman

Cover image from a propaganda poster for the Down to the Countryside Movement