Banished to the Great Northern Wilderness: Political Exile and Re-education in Mao’s China

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 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.