Lingering Casualties of ‘60s Cultural Revolution : Protest in Peking Seeks Deliverance From Rural Work and Exile

It was 1968 when he was first compelled to leave Peking and work in the Chinese countryside.

China then was in the midst of the Cultural Revolution, and he was a teen-age high school student.

Now, the man is in his 30s, married, with a 5-year-old son, working in a factory--and still trying after 17 years to persuade Chinese authorities to let him and his family move back to Peking where they grew up.

On Friday, holding his son in his arms, the man, who refused to identify himself, stood on the steps of Peking’s city hall and told a reporter: “Our parents are here and need our care. Where we live now, we have no relatives at all, and there is no one to take care of our child when we are away.”

For the past week, the man has been demonstrating along with more than 100 people in similar circumstances who have traveled to Peking from rural areas, seeking the right to return home. All of the demonstrators now live in Shanxi province in north-central China, 200 to 400 miles from Peking.

‘Save Us, Comrade’

Each day, the demonstrators sit on the steps of the municipal building under big red-and-white banners that say, “Peking-Educated Youth Sent off to Shanxi in 1968 Want Resolutely to Come Back to Their Hometown,” and, more simply, “Save Us, Comrade (Deng) Xiaoping.”

There were similar demonstrations in 1979 and 1980, when hundreds of thousands of youths sent away from Peking, Shanghai and other large cities to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution besieged authorities with requests to return home.

But this week’s incident serves as a striking example of the continuing human impact of the Cultural Revolution in China and of the extraordinary restrictions on freedom of mobility in this country.

In China, people are not free to move from one city to another whenever they please. Instead, they have to get approval from authorities to change their official household registration permit, a document required for obtaining housing, a job, food coupons and the other necessities of life.

Couples Separated

There are still instances in China where a husband and wife are required to live apart because they are unable to obtain residence permits in the same city.

Sometimes, a request to change a residency permit can be held up by sheer bureaucratic inertia. Sometimes the request is blocked by a factory or locality that does not want to let go of people assigned to it.

In addition, Chinese authorities have in recent years gone to great lengths to prevent people living in rural areas from flocking to large cities such as Shanghai and Peking. This policy of holding down the population of China’s largest cities may have made it more difficult for the people sent to Shanxi to get approval to return to Peking.

“Different people have different problems getting approval to come back to Peking,” said one woman demonstrator who now lives in the town of Lingfeng. “It’s hard to generalize about the reasons they won’t let us come back.”

Interviews Photographed

Although Peking authorities allowed the Shanxi residents to hold their protest, green-uniformed police officers took photographs of every demonstrator talking with a foreign correspondent.

The man holding the 5-year-old child said that another reason he wants to return to Peking is the low wage scale in Shanxi, a relatively poor province where coal mining is the principal industry. “We have not been paid enough to take care of our lives,” the man explained.

Another protester said that he will continue seeking permission to return to Peking, “even if it takes three decades.”

He said that some people sent to Shanxi province during Mao Tse-tung’s anti-rightist campaign of 1957 have finally, within the past year, been allowed to come home to Peking.