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Jonathan Unger. Education Under Mao: Class and Competition in Canton Schools, 1960-1980. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.

Like many developing countries in the Third World, China in the mid-1960s’ also had a serious “diploma disease”, i.e., the education system’s primary function is to provide the paper credentials for a job and young people had flooded into the schools where they learned skills that would have no relations to their own later lives (1-2). However, China differed from other countries because China, in the Cultural Revolution, tried to change this education system to a more practical and a “fairer” one. In this book, using Canton as an example, Jonathan Unger focuses on the China’s youth from 1960 to 1980 to see how different groups/ classes of people grew and suffered under the old socialist education system and later the radical education system of the Cultural Revolution, and how they had to ironically go back to the old system that they had abolished. Besides a powerful account of a generation of China’s youth, the book also possesses great analytical merits: it takes China’ education as an economically and politically functional organ of the whole socialist system, and successfully weaves the political and economic dimensions into the study of education to observe how they determined and influenced education policies.

Even though the education system from 1960 to 1980 is the topic of this book, the institutional changes of this system is not Unger’s biggest concern; instead, his focus is on what the system meant to the youth. Unger pursues this through everyday activities of the youth, especially the real problems that the children faced and cared about—the grading system, who is going to the universities, who can join the Communist Young League, who finds a decent job and who may stay in the city. By taking the students’ perspective, Unger characterizes the education system realistically.

From Unger’s concern for the education system’s impact on youth, one can discern a latent question that the author wants to answer, i.e., how did the Cultural Revolution (1966-1968 in Unger’s sense) happen and affect the different groups of youth? Unger approaches this question from a class-line perspective. In the first part of the book, seeking the social origins of the violent student uprising in the Cultural Revolution, he finds that in the mid-60s, antagonisms and grievances grew among students of different class backgrounds due to the growing competition of going to college, the shifting policies on college admission and the aggravated contests in joining the Young League to win political credentials. This class antagonism later transformed into Red Guard factionalism in the Cultural Revolution. In the second part of the book, Unger still focuses on the competition of the youth. Even when the CR’s policies had deprived students of a proper education and left them with few opportunities for a better life, the “class” line still worked: the officials, the revolutionary cadres’ children could go through the “back door” to factories and universities, leaving the bad-classes children always behind.

Unger treats China’s education system as the economically and politically functional organ of the society. First, urban schools offered labor supply for the economy. In bad industrial economic situations, the only way for the communist state to solve the economic crisis was to send the ready labors to the countryside, thus maintaining the stability in the cities. Also, education is center of the symbolic power struggles. In order to win in the two-line struggle, Mao and his radical followers disregarded and wiped off all that a normal education system needed, such as the responsible administrations, faculties and formal curriculums. However, in the end, it was the youth that pay the price for the blunders of the leaders.

As a very informative and vivid study, Education Under Mao does a good job in weaving different dimensions of the society into the education sphere; also the class line argument does have its merits, especially in explaining the beginning of the CR. However, the book also has its drawbacks. The first problem is its limited source base. From the interviews of the 43 people and some newspapers, Unger arrives at crucial statistics that greatly help to shape his conclusion. Though Unger convinced himself the reliability of their memories, these 43 interviewees is after all too small a sample to possess typicality of the whole Canton. Also, for some crucial numbers, the book fails to refer us to the accurate origins (note 29 of Chpt1.)

Another problem is the class line argument. In order to persist with the argument of the class-line competition, in the second part, Unger has to loosen and deviated the definition of “class” from the first part, arguing that the meaning of class has changed and the party radicals had already shifted many times the meaning of “class struggles” (182). Also, he tries hard to use the old labels to group people while actually referring to different groups of people; such as “revolutionary cadres” are used to label the PLA doctors (181) and “party officials” are referring to the newly empowered but not the party officials in the original class line. Here, then, a better approach may be to study what made the meaning of “class” change and what is a more substantial way to divide people, for this will lead to the inner mechanism of what determined the fates of the China’s youth. Here, we actually are facing the important methodological question, how to divide and perceive people in the CR especially in the later period when the original class-line origin has be devastated after 1968.

Xiaowei Zheng