Unsustainable Sacrifice: Household Economy and Grassroots Ideology in Late Socialist China, 1969-1979

Yanjie Huang, Columbia University

After almost a decade of stagnant wage and employments following the Great Leap Forward, the Chinese government sent 14 million urban youths to the countryside and military farms between 1969 and 1979. A mass disenfranchisement of urban families ’ guaranteed jobs and welfare, the send-down movement ostensibly aimed to strengthen class solidarity as the new base of socialism by mixing urban youths with the peasants. In practice, however, the send-down mobilization rested on the urban working class’s grassroots ideology, such as a sense of indebtedness and the belief in the state as the final provider the 1950s. While the movement achieves some of its economic objectives, such as alleviating its financial burden, the most important and durable impacts were on the grassroots. The forced mobilization transformed the urban household economy by de-territorializing the family and individualizing urban families' children into rational economic agents. As the movement progressed, the financial and emotional sacrifice it imposed on urban families eventually betrayed the principle of reciprocity and the urban families' hope in the state's care-taking responsibilities. Instead of achieving the revolutionary goals, the ideologically mobilized austerity measures of the send-down policy unwittingly created a family-centered alternative to the Maoist “revolutionary industrialization.” Xiaokang, the new vision, which appeared as a private family discourse in mid-1970s China, emerged as the official idiom of Chinese “socialism” by 1979. Based on family letters, grassroots archives, and a range of secondary sources, this paper examines the material and emotional costs of the sent-down movement on urban families against the contexts of the Cold War and the Cultural Revolution. It shows that the whole socialist experiment, which has always depended on the coherence between grassroots and official socialisms, lost its basis of popular support in the 1970s.

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 Presented in Session 155. Capitalizing on the Crisis of Socialism: The Pathways of China's Reform Reconsidered