Mao’s Hijacked Generation and the life of Wang Youfen

About Mao’s Hijacked Generation:

During a span of seventeen years (1962 to 1979), close to eighteen million Chinese educated youth, about one-half of an entire generation of literate teenagers from China’s cities, were sent off to remote places in the Chinese countryside, sometimes for a decade or more, to be “re-educated”, “to learn from the peasants.” These millions of kids who were the subjects of this massive program of social engineering are known in China as zhiqing, “educated youth,” in English, because they were literate middle and high school graduates from Chinese cities. They are also known as “Sent-Down Youth.”

This book includes personal accounts of zhiqing departure, arrival, and return, idealistic enthusiasm and abject disillusionment, tales of life, work, broken families, love and hate set in diverse rural locales, from jungle villages in China's Southeast to grassland outposts in Mongolia, from the banks of the Yellow River to the caves of Yan'an in China's Northeast. The stories narrate experiences of rape, famine, suicide, madness, true and false heroes, career derailment and career creation, ideological idealism, and ideological cynicism, among others.

About Robin Radin:

Robin Radin has enjoyed a diverse career as a historian of Japan and China; an international lawyer, mainly in financial transactions and regulation; and a business entrepreneur. He is the editor, with Wang Youfen, of Mao’s Hijacked Generation.

As a member of the history faculty at the University of Miami, Radin created and served as the director of the Japanese Studies Program from 1974 to 1976. After changing his career path from academic history to law, and graduating from Harvard Law School in 1979, he practiced law in New York City for eight years and another eight years in Tokyo and Hong Kong, where he was head of legal affairs for the Asia-Pacific Region for Morgan Stanley and then CSFB.

He returned to Harvard in 1996 as a senior associate of the Program on U.S.-Japan Relations; he then moved over to Harvard Law School where, from 1998 to 2003, he served as associate director of the Program on International Financial Systems. In 1998, he co-founded the program’s Japan-U.S. Financial Symposium, the premier annual bilateral forum for the past 26 years.

Radin is a graduate of the University of Chicago, the University of California, Berkeley, and Harvard Law School. He was a Visiting Foreign Scholar at Kyoto University from 1969 to 1971 under both Fulbright and Ford Foreign Area Fellowships.

As a business entrepreneur, among other projects, Radin was founder and CEO of the biotech company CropTech; a founder and senior executive of the mobile app technology platform company Toura; and a founder and senior executive, from 1997 to 2002, of the minerals distribution company White Gold Mountain Partners, a unique business joint venture between a small U.S. group and North Korea.

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