Banished to the Great Northern Wilderness: Political Exile and Re-education in Mao’s China (Contemporary Chinese Studies)

After Mao Zedong's Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957-58, Chinese intellectuals were subjected to "re-education" by the state. In Banished to the Great Northern Wilderness, Ning Wang draws on labor camp archives and other newly uncovered Chinese-language sources, including an interview with a camp guard, to provide a remarkable look at the suffering and complex psychological world of intellectuals banished to China's remote north. Wang's use of grassroots sources challenges our perception of the intellectual as a renegade martyr – revealing how exiles often denounced one another and, for self-preservation, declared allegiance to the state.