This narrative study examines the consequence of the Cultural Revolution experience for the 1966-1976 primary school students, who are labeled as Little Red Guards. They retrospectively identify both gains and losses from their schooling experience during the Cultural Revolution, which contrasts with the traditional victim image of the Red Guard generation. This study focuses on the coexistence of their positive and negative voices, specifically asking how are the positive and negative voices formed in the narratives of the former Little Red Guards, and what are the perceived gains and losses over time. The field work was conducted in Beijing in 2009 and 2010. Data was collected through oral histories and analyzed relying on the method of personal narrative analysis. Forty-nine informants participated, and twenty-six cases were selected as major data sources. Given the range in participants’ ages, selected cases are classified into three groups: 1966 senior primary school students (Group-A), 1966 junior primary school students (Group-B), and students who enrolled in primary school in the 1970s (Group-C). Furthermore, due to their subjective voices, the narratives are also divided into four sub-categories: positive, negative, neither (neither-positive-nor-negative) and both (both-positive-and-negative) voices. The oral data is presented with impressive moments, events, and episodes (at the factual level), and their reflections and self-generalizations (at the interpretative level). Data analysis suggests that the positive and/or negative voices are closely linked with students’ past position in school, which involved three roles: activists, students with a bad label, and ordinary participants. The activists basically hold positive points due to their student leader experiences as well as the beneficial social practices they engaged in. The labeled students tend to put forward totally negative accounts because of excluded experiences, characterized by alienation, discriminations, and frustrations. The ordinary participants, on one hand, assign negative comments to the meaningless social practices they participated; on the other hand, also highlight untended positive consequences for their later life. The findings reveal two determining themes within the diverse narratives: involvements in the political activities and participation in social practice. The two themes indicate two significantly hidden tissues: ideological awareness (IA) and practical awareness (PA).Working as the internalized predisposition, IA and PA expose the embodied history of the former Little Red Guards and a historically embedded process of their self-construction. Concerning the revolutionary context of the 1966-1976 education reform, this study combines and integrates IA and PA as constituting a revolutionary habitus (RH).The positive accounts relating to IA and PA display an elaborative meaning of RH; whereas the negative narratives concerning IA and PA demonstrate the restrictive meaning of RH. Therefore, the potential gains lie in the attainment of strong confident leadership and pragmatic social practice; while the losses refer to the formation of a pervasive sensitivity to political issues and a destructive recognition of the practical-oriented education. The finding of RH also stimulates more reflective thinking about the legacy of the 1966-1976 radical education reform, from the perspective of former Little Red Guards. / published_or_final_version / Education / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

One of the most fashionable impressions about the legacies of French May ’68 lurking in our capitalist society nowadays is perhaps the view that this historic episode has greatly inspired a chain of sexual liberations and anti-authoritarian lifestyle revolts within the realm of modern Western cultures. However, without actually questioning the ideological implications behind this liberal-libertarian ethos, the above convenient historical verdict may still help perpetuate the predominant logic of late capitalism and the concurrent status quo. Historically speaking, during the heyday of the worldwide leftist insurrections of the 1960s, the events of ’68 were never simply an isolated First-World phenomenon. Deeply entangled with the empirical lessons of the Maoist Cultural Revolution, May 68 in France has radically invoked and manifested many profound social queries and contestations against both the capitalist universality and the emerging Soviet revisionist thinking for two decades. In this dissertation, my primary research focus is precisely to call into question, through the optics of their inherent “Chinese connections,” the dominant narratives about the movements of May ’68 as merely a smoothening agent of massive “cultural reforms” in the capitalist West, instead of a continuous response toward the Maoist egalitarian principles that keeps incessantly catalyzing genuine political transformations in the sphere of global communitarian and quotidian practices. By analyzing and rehistoricizing a variety of cultural texts that include travel writings, memoirs, novels and films in relation to the subversive spirits of ’68, this study aims to reopen their heavily forsaken sociopolitical significances in order to recast some of the truly alternative historical imaginations of this epoch. Unlike the predominant methodologies of historiography and intellectual histories which usually marginalize cinematic texts as largely “illegitimate” data for the serious investigations of the sixties, this thesis particularly emphasizes the extensive study and critical reexamination of many insufficiently discussed or widely misinterpreted filmic representations of “China” that were produced by a large group of Western filmmakers such as Bertolucci, Godard, Antonioni, Casabianca, Viénet, and Yanne, under the adoptions of different art forms and genres between the 1960s and the 2000s. While the overreliance on European cinematic representations of China may potentially risk becoming a blind repetition of many contemporary capitalist stereotypes about the Maoist influences in May ’68 at the expense of those greatly innovative and dialectical Sino-Western encounters during the same period, this thesis also seeks to cautiously retain and reinscribe the latent heterogeneous, antagonistic, and historical Chinese characters long pertaining to the ensemble of the so-called “French Theory” advanced by Barthes, Kristeva, Lacan, and others since 1968, so as to retrieve certain unrealized revolutionary potentialities of the latter beyond the reigning ideological confines of neoliberalism today. I argue that this seemingly “redundant” or “generic” gesture of constantly delinking the multiple creative novelties adhering to the aforementioned Western cultural representations of “China” from the unique intellectual innovations of ’68 is highly crucial here, insofar as such excessiveness of negativity and refusal may nonetheless offer us a chance to persistently (re)search for some even better forms of emancipatory possibilities to come.

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This dissertation examines how the complex relations between the problem of the “culture worker” (wenyi gongzuozhe) and the challenges of socialist political economy were articulated and navigated in the Chinese Revolution. The point of historical and conceptual departure for this dissertation is Mao’s Talks at the Yan’an Conference on Literature and Art in 1942. I argue that the Talks provided a conceptual vocabulary for the problem of cultural production that revolved around the problematic of “life” (shenghuo) as the site of possibility for the fashioning of the culture worker under socialism. The demand that intellectuals “enter into life” (shenru shenghuo) necessitated that writers spend long periods labouring amongst workers and peasants, a demand that sought to suspend an understanding of the masses as a reified abstraction. By the same token, this demand called for a transformation of the culture worker, as well, which was to be felt at the level of subjectivity and embodied experience. The goal was that cultural production might itself be able to intervene in the production of new kinds of social relations, above all relations of labour. The dissertation demonstrates that, across the sustained cultural and economic experiment that was Chinese socialism, the cultural itself became reconfigured as a site of labour as it frequently placed demands upon intellectuals to give up a privileged existence, in order that their bodies and pens might move to a new set of social rhythms and temporalities.

This research examined the Chinese National College Entrance Examination (NCEE) in mathematics before and after the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, specifically covering the periods 1952–1965 and 1977–1984. The central focus was on the organization, structure, and content of the examinations, as well as their influence on and interaction with Chinese people and society. A mixed methodology approach was employed, primarily comprising three steps: (1) scrutinizing the sources and coding the information into structured formats, (2) organizing the data and tracking trends and changes, and (3) synthesizing the findings to formulate conclusions. Key findings included: (1) An increase in the number of items from 1979 to 1984, attributed to the introduction of new question formats following international collaboration between China and the United States. (2) A shift in topic coverage from traditional to modern subjects after 1976, reflecting curriculum concerns raised by Chinese mathematicians who advocated for educational content to evolve with societal and human development. (3) A decrease in item difficulty during the post-war and post-revolutionary periods of 1952, 1953, and 1977, reflecting the education system’s recovery from disruption and generally lower quality of teachers and students. (4) A shift toward an exam-oriented approach in teaching and learning, with its negative ramifications leading to criticisms from Chinese society and the eventual abolition of the NCEE system in 1966.

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This dissertation presents research on three topics relating to how education is linked to economic development in China. The data are obtained from the 2003, 2005, 2006 and 2013 Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS). The first essay examines the consequences of the Cultural Revolution. Using the 2003 and 2006 CGSS, the research is able to identify participants in a specific initiative, the “up to the mountains and down to the villages” movement (referred to as the Sentdown Campaign) and the length of time that they were involved in the initiative. The econometric results--including OLS, Heckit and 2SLS methods--provide evidence of substantial negative and long-lasting effects of the Cultural Revolution on education, labor force participation and personal income. Those who were involved in the Sentdown Campaign were found to be able to recoup some of these losses through the accumulation of education after they came back from rural areas, but these were generally not enough to compensate for the overall disruptions the Cultural Revolution caused on them. Furthermore, those who were sent down and stayed for more than five years in the countryside were not able to recuperate any lost years of schooling and, instead, suffered bigger losses in income than any of the other groups discussed in this essay. The second essay examines the attitudes of urban Chinese citizens towards migrants, as obtained using survey data from the 2005 CGSS. Estimating probit equations of the likelihood that the respondents in the sample had positive attitudes towards migrants, the research shows the connections between a range of explanatory variables and these attitudes. Educational attainment is not found to reduce negative attitudes towards migrants, a result that is different from the literature on the determinants of attitudes towards immigrants in recipient countries. The research also finds that as migrant presence grows in workplaces and neighborhoods, urban residents actually become more positive in their attitudes towards migrants. Gender is also found to have a significant impact on attitudes towards migrants. Men tend to have much more positive attitudes towards migrants, perhaps because social conventions frown against urban women having friendships with migrant men, or because the marriage market in urban China favors urban men marrying rural women. The third essay examines the role played by human capital in accounting for income growth in China between 2003 and 2013. An Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition of the growth in individual hourly income shows that the overall role played by human capital on income growth in China during this decade is significant for men but not for women. For men, human capital accounts for 0.1796 in log-income change between 2003 and 2013, which given the total log-income change in this time period for men was 0.9160, represents close to 20 percent of the growth in income in the country. For women, the impact is small and actually negative, equal to -0.0433 out of the 0.8435 increase in log-income during the decade, a result that is mostly the outcome of declining rates of return to education among females.