Chairman Mao's Children

Bin Xu is Associate Professor at Emory University, and the author of The Politics of Compassion: The Sichuan Earthquake and Civic Engagement in China (2017), which won the 2018 Best Book Prize for Cultural Sociology and Honorable Mention for Asia from the American Sociological Association.

• Introduction; 1. Winners' stories; 2. Unequal memories; 3. The wasted years and a land of wonder: The literary memory; 4. Regretless Youth and Long Live Youth!: Exhibits and museums as sites of memory; 5. Nostalgia, resistance, and the pursuit of happiness: Generation and memory in groups; 6. 'Comrades from five lakes and four seas!': When groups chuanlian (link up); Conclusion; Appendix: Methods and data.

'Questioning the mythologizing of the Educated Youth experience as embodied by elites such as Xi Jinping, Bin Xu gives us well-rounded portraits of losers as well as winners of this Cultural Revolution policy, while making a major contribution to the sociological study of the construction and consequences of memory.' Thomas Gold, University of California, Berkeley