The Museum of the 'Educated Youth' in Zibo

 I was surprised and very pleased to find this museum of the 'Educated Youth' tucked away on the outskirts of Zibo, in Shandong province, China.

You may see from the young enthusiasts in the sculpture at its centre (above) that it dates from the enthusiastic middle years of the Chinese Communist state, but it has a whole special meaning, encompassing idealism and social unheaval and even cruelty, but it is a complex and mixed story. I know some of the story because I happen to be friends with someone who was involved in it in their youth.

The 'educated Youth' that the Chinese phrase 'zhiqing' (知情）refers to has a specific and somewhat ironic meaning. It mainly refers to the 17 million Chinese teenagers who in the early 1970s, after the turmoil of the Red Guard and the Cultural Revolution were sent down to the countryside after the closure of the universities to work the land and 'learn from the peasants'. So the 'educated' is quite ironic because even though they were educated in many things by their rustication, they were turned off the educational path which they would otherwise have followed. Many did not really recover from this huge disruption of their lives.

Now it is really important to point out that the sudden surge of forced rustication is not the whole story. Young people had volunteered to go to the countryside for idealistic and polutical reasons since the late 1950s. Here is a volunteer group from Boshan in 1964:

And I know, from talking to someone who was in the 1970s upheaval that it was not always a bad thing to go to the countryside. There was cameraderie and purpose and it could toughen you up in ways that helped you. In fact the current leader of China was a 'zhiqing' himself.

The museum has many beautiful and touching photos of groups of youngsters heading down to the country. They look so young. It also has a fantastic set of the primitive-looking agricultural equipment that was used, including hand-drawn ploughs! Here are some of the groups and the equipment:

And here is a touching diorama showing the brick 'kang' (a heated bed, with a firebox under it) on which the Zhiqing would have slept in the cold Northern winters, along with some of their possessions to the left.

What the whole exhibition made me think once more was "How can you be a 90-year-old Chinese person and keep so much history in your head? How does your brain not explode?" And also, what on earth do you have in common with your grandchildren and great-grandchildren? How can you describe the 1940s, 50s, 60s and 70s in any terms that they will understand?

So maybe my takeaway from the museum was the idea of resilience. Anybody's resilience but specifically here the resilience of the Chinese, the Zhiqing, the 'old 100 names' and the inheritors of such glory and such pain.