No way back
In the second of a two-part series looking at the lasting effects of social engineering projects initiated in the 1950s, Hannah Xu meets some of Mao's 'sent-down youth' who never made it home. Pictures by Simon Song
Every afternoon, Zhang Huiying arrives at the activity room on time. Instead of joining in a mahjong game with fellow patients or taking a stroll on a treadmill, however, she walks straight to her seat, at the back of the room.
Zhang’s behaviour is not unusual; despite the many facilities here – fitness equipment, pool tables, a blaring wide-screen television and a reading corner with shelves of magazines and books – most of the patients prefer to remain seated throughout the two-hour activity session: motionless as if attending a boring lecture, saying nothing while wearing blank expressions.
“Many of them have lost motivation and interest in the real world,” says Wu Bin, a doctor who looks after the 40 patients here. “Their mind is in a world of the past.”
Zhang, 63, was one of China’s “sent-down youth” (zhiqing) – a scheme initiated by Mao Zedong in the late 1950s to encourage city youths to settle in the countryside and live the life of rural labourers. Also known as “rusticated youth”, young people continued to leave urban areas, either willingly or under coercion, until the end of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76).
Since 2008, Zhang has been living inside this white five-storey building: a psychiatric hospital unit, built specifically for former zhiqing on the outskirts of Jiamusi, a prefecture-level city at the northeastern tip of Heilongjiang province, 1,600 kilometres north of Beijing.
During the Cultural Revolution, 540,000 young people relocated to remote areas in the northeast. Although a great majority of them eventually returned to their home cities, Zhang and her fellow patients were unable to settle anywhere else.
For many years, the country has been divided by the topic of the zhiqing; this year even more so. In the run-up to the oncein- a-decade leadership transition, the focus was on a generation of leaders whose own experiences as zhiqing helped shape their lives. As the pomp and ceremony unfolded in Beijing, in another corner of the country, other former sent-down youth languished in this and other psychiatric hospitals.