What do you think?
Rate this book
Educated Youth
During the Cultural Revolution over fourteen million Chinese high school graduates were sent from the cities to live and work in the countryside. They were known as zhiqing – ‘educated youth’. They fell in love, married, had children. In the late 1970s the policy changed and they were allowed to return, but not their families. Many jumped at the opportunity, leaving spouses and children behind. Ten years later the children, now teenagers, began to turn up in the cities, looking for their parents. Educated Youth follows five such children, who have travelled across China from a province in the south west to Shanghai in the east, only to discover that their mothers and fathers have remarried, and have new families, in which there is no room for them. Their reappearance brings out the worst in the parents – their duplicity, greed and self-interest – and the best too, as they struggle to come to terms with their sense of love and duty.
Ye Xin was born in Shanghai in October 1949. He was sent to Guizhou Province as a zhiqing in 1969 and worked on the construction of the Hunan-Guizhou railway. His novels include High Sierra in Miaoling, The Ages of Idling Away, Family Education, Love Has No Choice and Shanghai Diary. He has won many awards including the October Prize and the National Prize for Best Novel. He is vice-chairman of the Writers’ Association of China and the Writers’ Association of Shanghai, and director of the Institute of Literature of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences.
Ye Xin was born in Shanghai in October 1949. He was sent to Guizhou Province as a zhiqing in 1969 and worked on the construction of the Hunan-Guizhou railway. His novels include High Sierra in Miaoling, The Ages of Idling Away, Family Education, Love Has No Choice and Shanghai Diary. He has won many awards including the October Prize and the National Prize for Best Novel. He is vice-chairman of the Writers’ Association of China and the Writers’ Association of Shanghai, and director of the Institute of Literature of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences.
- GenresChina
315 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1991
4 people are currently reading
56 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 24, 2017
Educated Youth is an astonishing book: I learned so much about a little known aspect of Chinese life from this novel…
From the early 1960s to the end of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), over 14 million high school graduates were uprooted from their homes and sent to do manual labour in rural parts of China, receiving – as Mao Tse Tung’s decree described it – ‘re-education from the peasants’. It was called shangshan xiaxiang, meaning ‘Up to the Mountains and Down to the Villages’, but it was basically a brain drain out of the cities. This crazy idea of Mao Tse Tung’s held back development in China because it wasted the skills and talents of an educated generation, but it also had an enormous impact on the personal lives of these zhiqing as they were called. It means ‘educated youth’.
(Perhaps because Mao finally recognised the economic impact of his stupid policy), the zhiqing were allowed to go back to their home cities in the mid 1970s. The mass movement of 14 million people is startling to contemplate – it’s more than the entire population of Australia in 1975 – but families and the cities in which they lived simply had to absorb these people. There were only two restrictions to prevent the zhiqing returning home: those who had been assigned jobs in the provinces, and those who had married there, had to stay where they were. Because of course, as the years went by, these young people had given up hope of return and had made some sort of home in the village to which they’d been assigned. Some of them fell in love, some of them made marriages out of a sense of compromise and fatalism, and some of them had children. But as soon as a return home became possible, the lure of the big city usually trumped whatever family life had been established. One way or another (and divorce was easy in Mao’s China) the zhiqing shed their domestic shackles and took off for the bright lights of their original home towns. Ye Xin’s novel is about what happens when children from the province of Xishuangbanna came to Shanghai seeking reunion with zhiqing who had abandoned them.
Through the stories of five children and their startled parents we see the results. Most Zhiqing had prudently kept their past lives private, and in their new relationships, usually lied about having been married before and having had children. Whereas in Australia there are sensitive protocols around reunions of pre-marital children and their relinquishing parents, no such sentimentality smoothed the way in Shanghai. The kids simply turned up, creating havoc within the family and embarrassment at work and in the community.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/07/24/e...
From the early 1960s to the end of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), over 14 million high school graduates were uprooted from their homes and sent to do manual labour in rural parts of China, receiving – as Mao Tse Tung’s decree described it – ‘re-education from the peasants’. It was called shangshan xiaxiang, meaning ‘Up to the Mountains and Down to the Villages’, but it was basically a brain drain out of the cities. This crazy idea of Mao Tse Tung’s held back development in China because it wasted the skills and talents of an educated generation, but it also had an enormous impact on the personal lives of these zhiqing as they were called. It means ‘educated youth’.
(Perhaps because Mao finally recognised the economic impact of his stupid policy), the zhiqing were allowed to go back to their home cities in the mid 1970s. The mass movement of 14 million people is startling to contemplate – it’s more than the entire population of Australia in 1975 – but families and the cities in which they lived simply had to absorb these people. There were only two restrictions to prevent the zhiqing returning home: those who had been assigned jobs in the provinces, and those who had married there, had to stay where they were. Because of course, as the years went by, these young people had given up hope of return and had made some sort of home in the village to which they’d been assigned. Some of them fell in love, some of them made marriages out of a sense of compromise and fatalism, and some of them had children. But as soon as a return home became possible, the lure of the big city usually trumped whatever family life had been established. One way or another (and divorce was easy in Mao’s China) the zhiqing shed their domestic shackles and took off for the bright lights of their original home towns. Ye Xin’s novel is about what happens when children from the province of Xishuangbanna came to Shanghai seeking reunion with zhiqing who had abandoned them.
Through the stories of five children and their startled parents we see the results. Most Zhiqing had prudently kept their past lives private, and in their new relationships, usually lied about having been married before and having had children. Whereas in Australia there are sensitive protocols around reunions of pre-marital children and their relinquishing parents, no such sentimentality smoothed the way in Shanghai. The kids simply turned up, creating havoc within the family and embarrassment at work and in the community.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/07/24/e...
January 3, 2026
This character-driven novel follows the journey of five adolescents as they journey across China to reunite with their Shanghai-based birth parents. These 'zhiqing' children (from the Xishuangbanna province in China), each with their own utopian image of what their parents will be like, ultimately discover the deceit, greed, selfishness and duplicity of their parents.
Although an excellent premise for a story, I found the plot to be discombobulated due to the sheer number of characters and interwoven stories.
Although an excellent premise for a story, I found the plot to be discombobulated due to the sheer number of characters and interwoven stories.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews