This is how you cultivate the rice paddy. The peasants form a straight line, shoulder-to-shoulder. They move as one through the ankle-deep water, eyes down to spot the weeds that threaten the uniformly spaced rice plants. But the weeds are not uprooted. Instead, the peasants push them underfoot into the mud, where they are transformed from noxious threat to beneficial fertilizer.

The passage could be a Marxist parable drawn from the pages of Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong, a collection of political and philosophical aphorisms that reached its apogee during China’s Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and ’70s. Known in the West as the “Little Red Book,” the Quotations were required reading for workers, soldiers, and even illiterate peasants in village lectures.

And if the Red Guards discovered a “counterrevolutionary” on the street without his Bible of “Mao Zedong Thought”? A beating, if he was lucky. If unlucky, imprisonment perhaps, or banishment to the countryside where hard labor would cure him of lingering bourgeois tendencies and integrate him back into the chairman’s vision of a scientific socialist society.

Call it political therapy, the re-education of society’s “weeds.”

In the China of the mid-1970s, though, re-education was not just therapeutic but preventive as well. And that is how, newly graduated from high school at 16, Dr. Ping Lu of the Department of Aerospace Engineering found himself not in a university classroom, but in a remote, impoverished farming village in the mountains of Guizhou Province, shoulder-to-shoulder with his fellow peasants, walking barefoot through rice paddies and pushing weeds into the soft, cool mud of an early summer morning.

The emperor’s new clothes and the ‘idiocy of rural life’
Eyes to the water, Lu might have noticed the lingering reflection of a bright star or planet before the sun drove the last traces of twilight from the sky. Yet he would not dwell on fading dreams of space exploration or the machines men build to navigate the cosmos. There was work to be done, and his lot was no different from millions of other youths required to leave their homes in China’s cities to shoulder crude implements on the nation’s communal farms.

Although the political rehabilitation of “capitalist roader” Deng Xiaoping in 1974 brought a brief respite, by the next year the Cultural Revolution had undergone yet another of its spasms of purge and intrigue as the re-ascendant “Gang of Four,” including Mao’s own wife, Jiang Qing, reinstated the era’s harsher measures, including the renewed repression of intellectuals and continued suspension of university entrance exams.

In fact, there had not been competitive examinations for admission to China’s universities since shortly after the Cultural Revolution began in 1966. For ten years university slots went not to those most qualified, but instead to “peasants,” “soldiers,” and “workers”—in practice, to the children of well-placed Communist Party functionaries.

Today the Cultural Revolution is seen largely as a reaction to the disastrous economic policies of the “Great Leap Forward” during which Mao attempted to force-march China to unsustainable levels of industrial and agricultural production. As a consequence of that scheme’s collapse, millions of youth were faced with poor job prospects upon leaving school. Rather than deal with this population in the cities, party ideologues and hardliners opted instead to dispatch students to the countryside for “re-education,” where potentially subversive energies would be dissipated in what Karl Marx had termed “the idiocy of rural life.”

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