By Michelle Lee
Archival records dating back to the 1970s reveal China’s criminal investigations of rural men who were falsely accused of sexual crimes against urban women played a crucial role in subverting the Sent-Down Youth Movement, a key part of the Cultural Revolution.
These trumped-up criminal proceedings ultimately deepened the divide between China’s urban and rural residents, says Xiaojian Zhao, a UC Santa Barbara professor of Asian American Studies.
UC Santa Barbara Asian American Studies professor Xiaojian Zhao and UC Santa Cruz professor Emily Honig’s book, Across the Great Divide: The Sent-Down Youth Movement in Mao’s China, 1968–1980. Photo courtesy of Cambridge University Press.
In a virtual talk earlier this month hosted by the UCSB East Asia Center, Zhao walked viewers through archival research that offers new context to the criminalization of female sexual abuse during the Sent-Down Youth Movement. The research is a part of Zhao’s latest book, Across the Great Divide: The Sent-Down Youth Movement in Mao's China, 1968–1980, co-authored by UC Santa Cruz professor Emily Honig.
The Sent-Down Youth Movement was a defining period in China’s Cultural Revolution. From 1968 to 1980, nearly 17 million urban students were forcibly relocated to rural Chinese villages in an organized effort to bridge the gap between China’s rural and urban populations.
“For several decades, both scholars and popular accounts of the Sent-Down Youth Movement have focused on the theme of sexual abuse,” Zhao said. “We have learned about the Sent-Down Youth Movement by fiction, film and other work, and regarded such abuse as symbolic of the victimization of women.”
In 1973, the Chinese central government, noting increasing complications within the movement, launched a campaign that aimed to punish people who were disloyal to the movement. The campaign sparked a series of investigations against rural village men accused of sexual crimes involving female sent-down youths.
Popular media and academia have widely covered the sexual abuse of urban women during the movement, but these accounts are often dramatized and do not tell the full story, Zhao said.
“A typical dramatized tale would include a powerful local cadre, who had the power to send sent-down youths to college or an urban factory, and a vulnerable and helpless female sent-down youth, who had no other choice than to have sex with this powerful cadre in exchange for such opportunities,” Zhao said.
UC Santa Barbara Asian American Studies professor Xiaojian Zhao presented her talk Crime and Punishment: Revisiting the Sent-Down Youth Movement in Mao’s China to a virtual UCSB audience.
But analyses of county archive documents, such as meeting notes, proposals, statistical tables, conference speech transcripts, telephone call records, grievance reports and investigation files, unveil a striking pattern of male rural villagers being falsely incriminated for sexual crimes.
“The overwhelming majority of men accused of abuse during the campaign were actually poor villagers who had no power,” Zhao said.
The archival documents illustrate how following 1973, sexual acts that were previously deemed immoral, such as premarital sex and romantic relations between rural men and urban women, were suddenly labeled and arraigned as sexual crimes, connoted through the character, jian.
“By far, the most frequently invoked crime was jian-wu,” Zhao said. “Most literally, it’s a sexual violation, molestation or assault and rape, but then the term was applied to any sexual relationship involving urban women.”
An archival document, left, and a male villager accused of sexual abuse ,featured in UC Santa Barbara Asian American Studies professor Xiaojian Zhao’s virtual talk, Crime and Punishment: Revisiting the Sent-Down Youth Movement in Mao’s China.
While on the surface, these investigations of sexual abuse may seem to resemble contemporary efforts to address sexual violence against women, Zhao explained that this was not the case. Rather, the criminalization of rural men was a way for the Chinese central government to create a scapegoat for the impending failure of the Sent-Down Youth Movement.
“As problems with the Sent-Down Youth Movement became increasingly troublesome, some people had to take the blame and it was easier to issue accusations of sexual crimes than confront underlying problems,” she said.
In effect, the 1973 campaign reinforced the very social hierarchies that the Sent-Down Youth Movement sought to dissemble.
“The stated aim of the campaign was to punish individuals for undermining the Sent-Down Youth Movement,” Zhao said. “But it was this craziness, all for the investigation campaign, that ultimately subverted it by creating a stereotypical image of villagers as abusers who were unfit to host, let alone educate, the urban youth.”
Michelle Lee is a third-year communication major at UCSB who is also pursuing the professional writing minor. She wrote this article for her Writing Program class, Journalism for Web and Social Media.