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Asian Voices Ser.: Finding China's Lost Generation : The Beijing Fifty-Five by John Israel (2023, Hardcover)

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About this product

Product Identifiers

PublisherBloomsbury Publishing USA

ISBN-101538174243

ISBN-139781538174241

eBay Product ID (ePID)6057266169

Product Key Features

Number of Pages136 Pages

Publication NameFinding China's Lost Generation : the Beijing Fifty Five

LanguageEnglish

Publication Year2023

SubjectPolitical Ideologies / Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism, Sociology / General, Asia / China

TypeTextbook

Subject AreaPolitical Science, Social Science, History

AuthorJohn Israel

SeriesAsian Voices Ser.

FormatHardcover

Dimensions

Item Height0.6 in

Item Weight14.3 Oz

Item Length9.4 in

Item Width6.2 in

Additional Product Features

Intended AudienceScholarly & Professional

LCCN2022-053811

ReviewsBased on oral history supplemented by personal diaries and a written memoir, John Israel's book makes up for pleasant and instructive reading, thanks to the crafty knitting of the voice of the actors with the enlightening explanations and witty remarks of the author. Focusing entirely on the fate of a group of 55 Beijing "educated youth" who volunteered in early 1968 to go to a distant countryside and practice hard labor there, months before Mao ordered their entire generation to do so, the author is able to vividly present many aspects of the experience of the almost 20 million members of the "Lost Generation", who spent the best years of their youth in a rural exile without a definite term. Following the destinies and the intellectual evolution of some of them until today, this book provides food for thought on Mao's legacy and on the mix of drastic changes and heavy continuities in post-Mao China., Finding China's Lost Generation joins a very short list of excellent books where former sent down youth contrast their earlier lives with life in post-Mao China, while reflecting on the valuable survival skills they learned from their challenging rural experience. We are shown how national and local politics impacted these idealistic youth, who seek to balance their revolutionary values with tactical pragmatism, and how their revolutionary fervor was gradually transformed into disillusionment. The insights provided will be of great interest to both general readers and China specialists., "Finding China's Lost Generation joins a very short list of excellent books where former sent down youth contrast their earlier lives with life in post-Mao China, while reflecting on the valuable survival skills they learned from their challenging rural experience. We are shown how national and local politics impacted these idealistic youth, who seek to balance their revolutionary values with tactical pragmatism, and how their revolutionary fervor was gradually transformed into disillusionment. The insights provided will be of great interest to both general readers and China specialists." --Stanley Rosen, University of Southern California "Based on oral history supplemented by personal diaries and a written memoir, John Israel's book makes up for pleasant and instructive reading, thanks to the crafty knitting of the voice of the actors with the enlightening explanations and witty remarks of the author. Focusing entirely on the fate of a group of 55 Beijing "educated youth" who volunteered in early 1968 to go to a distant countryside and practice hard labor there, months before Mao ordered their entire generation to do so, the author is able to vividly present many aspects of the experience of the almost 20 million members of the "Lost Generation", who spent the best years of their youth in a rural exile without a definite term. Following the destinies and the intellectual evolution of some of them until today, this book provides food for thought on Mao's legacy and on the mix of drastic changes and heavy continuities in post-Mao China." --Michel Bonnin, author of The Lost Generation: The Rustication of China's Educated Youth (1968-1980) "Amidst the many autobiographical and sociological accounts of China's Cultural Revolution generation, this book is unique in its focus on a small collective - the Beijing fifty-fivers. Professor John Israel brings their stories to life through extensive quotations from their diaries, memoirs, and other personal documents." --Guobin Yang, author of The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China, Amidst the many autobiographical and sociological accounts of China's Cultural Revolution generation, this book is unique in its focus on a small collective - the Beijing fifty-fivers. Professor John Israel brings their stories to life through extensive quotations from their diaries, memoirs, and other personal documents.

Dewey Edition23

IllustratedYes

Dewey Decimal951.056

SynopsisThe book covers the lives of a group of Beijing middle and high school students who, in the middle of China's Cultural Revolution, volunteered to help transform Yunnan's triple-canopy rain tropical rain forests into rubber plantations. It concludes with an account of their contribution to China's post-Maoist transformation., In December 1968 Mao Zedong proclaimed that China's educated urban youth should move to the countryside to be reeducated by the poor and lower middle peasants. Some seventeen million who responded to his call spent the better part of a decade laboring in remote and impoverished regions. Returning to the cities in the late 1970s, undereducated, unemployed, and manifestly unprepared to contribute to China's post-Maoist future, the rusticated youth were dubbed the "Lost Generation". How then, could China transform itself into an economic and military behemoth without the support of an entire generation of educated men and women? A close look at a group of young Beijingers suggests that at least some of the rusticated millions reentered urban life with assets that enabled them to play a creative role. "The Beijing Fifty-five" were atypical insofar as they had volunteered to carve rubber plantations out of a tropical wilderness on China's southwest border a year before the wave of involuntary recruits. However, their struggle to survive cultural, political, and physical challenges was typical. Drawing from the spoken and written testimony of the Fifty-five, this book shows in dramatic detail how "The Lost Generation" survived the tribulations of the Mao years to help build today's China., This is a book about one of the first groups of young Red Guards who, inspired by Maoist ideology, volunteered to leave their city and become rural laborers, potentially for life. The book presents their experience of a decade in a difficult rural environment, their final return to their city and their fate after this return. The book draws lessons from that historical event., This book provides a detailed and in-depth study of a group of volunteers among the much larger group of rusticated youth, who were mainly only "forced volunteers". This specific group, although not representative, is interesting because it shows how idealists (considered as "models") reacted on the long term to an unexpected reality.

LC Classification NumberHQ799.C552B464 2023