Howling to the moon

During the Cultural Revolution Chairman Mao called for intellectual city-dwellers to spend time in the countryside and be ‘rusticated’. The official paper the People’s Daily voiced Mao’s call for integration in 1968: ‘they must be re-educated by workers, peasants and soldiers under the guidance of the correct line’. As a consequence, millions of students were distributed amongst the various farming and agricultural communities of rural China. Jiang Rong’s first novel draws on his experiences as a shepherd amongst the nomadic tribes of the grasslands of Inner Mongolia during this period. He shows how the re-education of the students was merely a cosmetic part of the reorganisation of the country; the centre cared little about the actual lives of the peasants, just that they toe and teach the ‘correct line’. The lie at the heart of Mao’s pronouncements — the lives of those workers he was enfranchising were actively being destroyed by his policies — is the subject of this compelling novel.