Banished to the Great Northern Wilderness

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Banished to the Great Northern Wilderness is written by Ning Wang and published by UBC Press. It's available with International Standard Book Number or ISBN identification 0774832266 (ISBN 10) and 9780774832267 (ISBN 13).

Following 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 labour farm archives, interviews, and memoirs to provide a remarkable look at the suffering and complex psychological world of banished Beijing intellectuals. Wang’s use of these newly uncovered Chinese-language sources challenges the concept of the intellectual as renegade martyr – showing how exiles often declared allegiance to the state for self-preservation. While Mao’s campaign victimized the banished, many of those same people also turned against their comrades. Wang describes the ways in which the state sought to remould the intellectuals, and he illuminates the strategies the exiles used to deal with camp officials and improve their chances of survival.