Book Review: Dictatorship by Degrees: Xi Jinping in China by Steven P. Feldman

at the bottom. Today, these disparate groups of zhiqing, now retired, often organize outings and activities to commemorate their once collective life at the locale where they had been settled. On such occasions these various elderly individuals have a chance to recall the past and to interact with each other. This is when the ‘fault lines along class and ideology’ (p. 209) among them become visible. The high social and/or political groups with pleasant memories of the sent-down days, armed with their social and political capital, do not hide their supercilious contempt for the ordinary zhiqing. These hierarchical social interactions are vividly documented in entertaining detail in Chapter 6, in which a large contingent of former zhiqing who had been settled in the Heilongjiang countryside take a token ‘“New Long March” along the One Belt and One Road’ (p. 212), attempting to relive their Red Guard linking-up movement. These disparate groups of zhiqing do share one commonality – one aspect of their memories aligns with the official portrayal of the zhiqing’s experience, highlighting their youth, contributions, and positive personal qualities of perseverance and determination in the countryside. They have adopted what Xu repeatedly emphasizes is the official pattern of focusing on ‘people but not the event’, similar to museum displays, zhiqing literature, and their autobiographies. However, Xu has not probed for a deeper explanation. My own observations when I interviewed former Red Guards in the 1970s who had been sent down is that introspection would have led them to confront periods and episodes in which they had personally contravened ethical behaviour. Consciously or subconsciously zhiqing writings therefore lack self-reflection. Former good-class Red Guards prefer to remember their heroic self-reliance in the countryside, while some of the middling-class Red Guards and those who were not allowed to join the Red Guards remember themselves as victims for the entire course of their life history.