Red Revolution, Green Revolution by Sigrid Schmalzer;

Author:Sigrid Schmalzer; [Schmalzer, Sigrid]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780226330297
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2016-01-12T06:00:00+00:00

“I Had Knowledge”

Though the pleasure of reading warranted some risk, this was not the only significance books held for youth in the countryside. Reading was essential to their identity as educated people possessing wenhua. Today Mao-era educated youth easily recall the sense that their knowledge set them apart from the ordinary peasants in the villages to which they were assigned. As one sent-down youth told me, “The way we thought about it at that time was that we knew that we were knowledgeable, and so we should tell” peasants how to improve agriculture.25

The knowledge that educated youth were perceived to possess extended beyond what they would have learned in the classroom. Their wenhua equated to modernity and gave them authority over any technology deemed “advanced.” Former educated youths I interviewed often dismissed the notion that old peasants could engage in advanced technologies such as spreading chemical fertilizer or insecticide (figure 20). One former educated youth recalled his experiment group’s first forays with chemical insecticides. They had attempted using lights at night to observe the populations, but they could not see anything and gave up. So they put in a requisition for funding and traveled to the county seat to buy BHC, DDT, and two backpack sprayers. “At that time, these were very advanced—no one had them in [the whole commune]. When we used them, the peasants all stood in a circle to watch and thought it very curious and very advanced. After a few hours bugs started dying quickly. . . . The peasants thought it was great.”26 The image of a group of ordinary peasants watching the educated youth in appreciation or even amazement as they demonstrated a new technology captures well the widely accepted notion that educated youth embodied modern culture.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.