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. Rong particularly anatomises the destructive nature of the aggressive modernisation undertaken after the Cultural Revolution started in 1966, and his book’s counsel sounds a note of warning to contemporary China.
The novel is slow-burning, steadily building up a picture of the complex ways in which the nomadic peoples rely on the grassland. Rong is particularly careful to represent the delicate ecological balance between people and environment. This harmony is represented by the Mongolian wolf, one of the most perfectly evolved creatures on earth. Initially terrified by the creatures, Chen Zhen comes to love them and cherish their ability to keep the ecological balance in the grassland. He steals a cub and raises it to understand the species further, and is constantly astounded by the wolf’s intelligence, stubbornness and beauty.
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