Some Sufferings Are More Equal Than Others: Inequality and Memory of China’s Zhiqing Generation

Some Sufferings Are More Equal Than Others: Inequality and Memory of China's Zhiqing Generation

Bin Xu - CEAS Postdoctoral Associate & Lecturer in Sociology

Tuesday, November 18, 2014 - 12:00pm to 1:30pm
Room 218, East Asia Library, SML See map
120 High Street
New Haven, CT 06511

In the 1960s and 1970s, the Chinese state sent about 17 million secondary school graduates (zhiqing, short for zhishi qingnian, “the educated youth”) to villages and state farms for political, economic, and social purposes. Among them there were China’s President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang. This large-scale migration program ended in the late 1970s when the state implicitly admitted its failure. Since the zhiqing returned to cities, their memory flourished in various cultural objects, commemorative sites, and reunion activities. Central to the memory is a “difficult past” problem.  Although the historical event is politically controversial and socially detrimental, the participants endeavor to reaffirm values of their youth and traditional virtues they cherish, such as self-sacrifice and perseverance. How do the former zhiqing come to terms with the “difficult past”? What can account for their various ways of commemorating the past? This ongoing project draws on a large amount of data collected during fieldwork from 2012 to 2014, including in-depth interviews, participant observation, visits to memorials, literary works, memoirs, and archives. Xu argues that former zhiqing’s present class positions and other inequality-related factors are central to both their generational collective memory and their individual memories. This project brings social class back  to the sociology of collective memory. Xu theorizes the “difficult past” issue as struggle for symbolic capital—public recognition of dignity of a group or individual who is connected to a controversial event—and, thus, reconnects collective memory to the vast literature on social inequality and culture. 

Bin Xu received his Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 2011.  His dissertation, “The Elusive Harmony: Moral Legitimation and State-Society Relations in the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake in China,” examines how the Chinese state interacted with civil society in the wake of the Sichuan earthquake.  The state-society interactions revolved around some moral issues pertaining to life and death and involved leaders’ compassionate performance, civil society’s participation in relief work, and the mourning ritual for the victims.  During his term as a Postdoctoral Associate at Yale, he will work on a new project on collective memories of China’s “educated youth” (zhiqing) generation.  He will also teach a course on “Collective Memories in East Asia.”

Please RSVP to eastasian.studies@yale.edu by 11/11

Light lunch will be provided.

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China