Compte rendu : The Lost Generation
Chen, Yixin. Review of ‘The Lost Generation: The Rustication of China’s Educated Youth (1968–1980)’. The China Journal, 74, July 2015. pp 223-224. URL : http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/681752 (consulté le 13 août 2015)
Michel Bonnin’s book first appeared in French in 2004, at a time when the academic world needed in-depth research into the so-called “down to the countryside” (xiaxiang) movement initiated by Mao during which nearly 17 million young urban Chinese were sent to settle in rural areas between 1968 and 1980. When Bonnin first published his book, Thomas Bernstein’s pioneering work presenting China’s rustication of young people as a model of rural development for the Third World was outdated, having been published in 1977. Bernstein’s book was also outdated because it gave little consideration to the hardships and trauma experienced by the majority of the youths. Other Western scholars such as Anita Chan and Jung Lin had studied “Mao’s children”, the Red Guards of 1966–68, the same group of people who became Bonnin’s “lost generation”, but they never systematically examined the sent-down-to-the-countryside life of this generation. In China, great numbers of publications on the xiaxiang experience appeared in the period from the 1980s to the 2000s, in the form of books, articles, memoirs, reports and novels but, with the exception of Liu Xiaomeng’s outstanding study of the history of the down-to-the-countryside movement, few offered any convincing explanations of the program’s purpose. Bonnin’s book has filled a vacuum in the Western literature and provides a comprehensive analysis useful to scholarship.
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- Ouvrage traduit de : Génération perdue. Le mouvement d’envoi des jeunes instruits à la campagne en Chine, 1968-1980. Paris : Éditions de l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 2004, 491 p. Disponible à la bibliothèque du CECMC
- L’ ouvrage a été traduit par Krystyna Horko. Il est paru début juillet 2013 aux éditions de l’université chinoise de Hong Kong (The Chinese University Press) sous le titre : The Lost Generation: The Rustication of China’s Educated Youth (1968–1980).
- Plus de détails sur les versions chinoises : http://cecmc.hypotheses.org/12304
OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Monique Abud (13 août 2015). Compte rendu : The Lost Generation. Carnets du Centre Chine (CNRS/EHESS). Consulté le 16 janvier 2026 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/mf7r


