Properly translated, that phrase from The Communist Manifesto refers more to the political isolation of remote rural communities than to the intellectual skills of the peasantry. Yet it carried a particular irony for Ping Lu, as the presumed political re-education he was to receive in the tiny farming village of Xintian was no more possible than the university education China’s best and brightest had been deprived of the past ten years.

“That was the emperor’s new clothes.” Half a lifetime later, Ping Lu sits in his Howe Hall office, surrounded by computer screens and models of spacecraft. “You were there supposedly to get an education,” says Lu. “But once there, no one had in mind that they would ‘re-educate’ you. The villagers couldn’t care less about that.

“There were few political demands,” Lu continues. “You spent all your time working. People in the countryside didn’t care about politics. Your purpose was just about making a living. It was really quite depressing—pretty grim, initially.”

‘Why do you want to study English?’
The son of physicians, in another time or place a leading young scholar such as Lu would have had his pick of the best universities to continue his education. But physicians enjoyed little social status above others in Mao’s China, and, shortly after finishing medical school, Lu’s parents were dispatched to Zunyi, the second largest city in the economic backwater of Guizhou province, where Lu was born in 1958.

Lu remembers the manic atmosphere of his early adolescence under the Cultural Revolution—the banners, the propaganda blaring from loudspeakers, the waves of Red Guards parading nightly through the streets of Zunyi. He recalls the meetings of workers and local party officials his parents would attend regularly in order to avoid official “criticism” or, worse, denunciation as counterrevolutionaries.

“You had what they would call ‘objects of criticism,’” Lu says. “My father had a tendency to say things when he saw something he didn’t like—and that tends to get you in trouble. So he was one of those people periodically targeted.”

Lu is quick to observe that his family was not exceptional in this regard: it was simply the times in which they lived. Nor, he adds, was the Cultural Revolution uniformly bleak from an educational standpoint, as the intermittent rehabilitation of Deng and other comparatively progressive forces in the Chinese Communist hierarchy loosened the curriculum from the grip of the ideologues.

It was just such a time, when Lu entered middle school, that the Cultural Revolution paused long enough for schools to focus once again on education rather than indoctrination. He excelled in math and science and briefly dreamed that one day he might get the opportunity for a university education. It was, he recalls, the launching pad for whatever intellectual and academic ambitions he would dare entertain in those turbulent times.

Yet it would not last. By the second year of high school, Deng had again been purged—and intellectual ambition was again dismissed as an expression of bourgeois individualism. Even the study of English, Lu notes, had fallen into disfavor. “Why do you want to study English?” his teachers would ask. “Do you think the Americans are better?”

Once more, the young man’s future was mortgaged to the ebb and flow of politics. “The ups and downs of my education,” Lu says with a rueful grin, “were intimately tied to the fate of Deng Xiaoping.”

So in 1975, as the Gang of Four cracked down on its opponents yet again, Ping Lu graduated from high school only to prepare himself, not for the bright academic future his hard work and talent had earned, but to take his place among the millions who had gone into the countryside before him.

A distance more forbidding
Despite decades of Cold War antagonism, the Soviet Union had long abandoned the revolutionary zeal of the Bolsheviks for “realpolitik,” which included seemingly antagonistic concepts such as mutual assured destruction and scientific collaboration with their mortal enemies in the West. Yet Ping Lu had barely an inkling of the Apollo-Soyuz international space flight taking place high overhead as he spent his first summer in Xintian village in July 1975.

“We knew just some very scant basic facts,” Lu says. “Not any details. And I don’t think that anybody knew anything about aerospace engineering, at least in my case.”

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