COLLECTIVE MEMORIES OF 48 SENT-DOWN YOUTHS IN LIAOXI-SHENYANG
Translated by Nicky Harman
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During China's Cultural Revolution, over sixteen million urban youth were sent to the countryside for "re-education through labor." This remarkable work chronicles one group of forty-eight sent-down youths dispatched to Panjin in Liaoning Province, preserving their stories of physical toil, camaraderie, hunger, and endurance through one of modern China's most turbulent periods. Zhang Ling draws on rarely found archival materials and first-person testimony to reconstruct the complete arc of a sent-down youth site — from its establishment through its eventual dissolution. The result is both deeply personal and historically significant, capturing individual lives within a vast political upheaval. More than a record of suffering, this is a testament to collective memory itself — how a generation chose to remember, and refused to let their experience disappear into silence.
