Historically Remaining Issues: The Shanghai–Xinjiang Zhiqing Migration Program and the Tangled Legacies of the Mao Era in China, 1980–2017

Abstract

This article addresses social legacies or “historically remaining issues”—the impacts of Mao-era policies and practices on life courses, socioeconomic statuses, living conditions, and other aspects of social life in the post-Mao era. These social legacies involve state–society interactions on policy adjustments and symbolic practices and, therefore, are tangled up with other legacies, institutional and cultural, of the Mao years. This point is illustrated in a study of the Shanghai–Xinjiang zhiqing migration program of 1963–1966, in which about 97,000 Shanghai “ zhiqing” (educated youths) were mobilized to settle in the Xinjiang Construction and Production Corps. After petitions and protests in 1979–1980, some returned to Shanghai legally, but others returned to and remained in Shanghai without documents. This article discusses how Shanghai zhiqing returnees have been petitioning and protesting to pressure the state to solve problems relating to their hukou, pensions, and healthcare, and how the state responded with repression and incremental, ad hoc policy changes, which have caused repercussions and provoked grievances. State–society interactions over the social legacies of the Shanghai–Xinjiang migration program have been constrained by related institutional and cultural legacies, including the hukou system, the status of the Xinjiang Construction and Production Corps, the state’s positive historical assessment of the Shanghai–Xinjiang program, and the zhiqing’s pride in and confusion over their identities.