“Educated youth” refers to the 20 million or so urban Chinese young people who were sent to the countryside for extended periods during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), either to peasant villages or to state/army-run farms in the border areas, for reasons both ideological (urban youths needed to “make revolution” together with the poor peasants) and practical (the Cultural Revolution reduced many Chinese cities to chaos, there were few jobs for high school graduates and universities were closed, so restless Red Guards needed to be somewhere other than in China’s cities). The text translated here offers Xiang’s reflections on the significance for the Chinese social sciences of the retirement of the “educated youth” (or “sent-down youth,” or Zhiqing 知青) generation from the front-lines of scholarship, which occurred in roughly 2015, the date of the initial publication of Xiang’s essay. His 2020 volume Self As Method (in Chinese, 把自己作为方法), has already sold over 150,000 copies and was voted “China’s most impactful book for 2020.” Xiang and I are collaborating on an English translation of the book. Among his many well-regarded publications, Global 'Body Shopping': An Indian International Labor System in the Information Technology Industry (in English) won the Anthony Leeds Prize in 2008, and “Predatory Princes and Princely Peddlers: The State and International Labor Migration Brokers in China” (also in English), won the William L. Xiang began his scholarly career by studying migrant workers in Beijing, and subsequently broadened his focus to high-tech Indian “migrant labor” in Australia, and then later still to the subject of unskilled labor migration from China to Japan, South Korea and Singapore. 1972) did his undergraduate work at Peking University and is currently Professor of Social Anthropology at Oxford University, as well as a Director at the Max Planck Institute. Introduction and Translation by David Ownby Xiang Biao, “T he End of the ‘Educated Youth Era’ in Chinese Social Science”
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