Benevolent Reeducation and Active Remolding: A Perspective from Liu Yuxuan’s Diary and Correspondence

Abstract

Using recently published personal correspondence and a diary (supplemented by camp gazetteers, recollections, etc.), this article attempts to examine the experiences and inner world of Liu Yuxuan, an intellectual persecuted in 1950s China, during his internment in a reeducation-through-labor (laojiao) camp—his activism in ideological remolding, his perspectives on himself and his campmates, his wife’s role in his redemption, and some practices of and conditions in the Shandong First Laojiao Institution. While recent scholarship has noted the presence of relatively benevolent laojiao camps in the Mao Zedong era, this article shows what reeducation was like for a single individual. It also shows that, for certain types of victims of the Chinese Communist Party’s political campaigns, reeducation involved both genuine efforts for transformation and pragmatic concerns regarding surviving laojiao.