Embodying the Revolution: Female Sent-Down Youth on the Yunnan Frontier, 1969-1980

Abstract

This thesis examines the Chinese Rustication Movement—the mass sending of urban youth to the countryside for labor and “reeducation” between 1968–1980—through the life of Wei Guo, a Shanghai middle-school graduate sent to the Yunnan Production and Construction Corps in 1969. Drawing on oral history interviews, published memoir collections, provincial investigation reports, and contemporaneous press, it offers an embodied microhistory of rustication. Chapter One follows Wei’s migration and adjustment to Yunnan, arguing that the frontier functioned as a material test of the state’s equality project, where terrain, disease, labor, and climate often overwhelmed Maoist claims about socialist sameness. Chapter Two traces Wei’s rise into Iron Woman roles, showing that the same gender model that legitimized women’s entry into male-coded labor also exposed them to bodily harm, surveillance, and sexual vulnerability. Chapter Three follows Wei’s return to Shanghai and her retrospective narration decades later, arguing that her turn to cosmological frameworks such as fate marks a rejection of revolutionary narratives that her lived experience had already falsified. The thesis argues that the Rustication Movement was lived most forcefully on and through the body, and that the body is where the movement’s contradictions come most clearly into view. In doing so, it intervenes in a historiography long shaped by state-centered frameworks in both English- and Chinese-language scholarship. By centering grassroots oral history from Yunnan and women’s retrospective narration, the study highlights three under-examined dimensions of rustication: the body as a site of historical knowledge, the ecological specificity of place, and the return of cosmological modes of meaning-making after the failure of revolutionary promises. Policies articulated as gender-neutral were lived in deeply gendered ways, producing both genuine openings and lasting bodily costs. At the ground level, lived experience challenged—and even inverted—party aims to transform the frontier, promote gender equality, and eliminate superstitious beliefs.