Zhiqing as a Subversive Force?

J. F. Jenner offered an interesting take in 1994 on zhiqing (知青), or urban youths sent to the countryside during the Chinese Cultural Revolution (pictured) beginning in 1966.

In his book The Tyranny of History - The Roots of China's Crisis (The Penguin Press, 1994), Jenner suggested that these former zhiqing could potentially be a subversive force.

He observed that "the millions of half-educated, no longer young ex-urbanites returning to the cities from their rural exile in the late 1970s were a more subversive force in the history of Chinese culture than any previous generation."

"With a few exceptions the best of them believed in no ideological system and felt no need for a belief package. Earlier generations had attacked tradition but only to try to replace or modify it with something else - Buddhism, new varieties of scientism, Marxism, militarism, fascism and other sets of ideas."

"If you have beaten up, possibly killed an official or a school teacher or two in your teens and rebelled against your parents and the local Party bosses, you can never quite be re-absorbed by a value system that depends on unquestioning acceptance of the authority of such people."

"And when you have been cruelly deceived by the alternative "revolutionary" system, there is not much room left for illusion ... This generation and its successors have been unable to put together what was broken, even when some of them try to find strength and meaning in the traditions they rejected in their youth."

Was Jenner right? Even with the benefit of hindsight, I cannot say with absolute certainty.