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Children of the Cultural Revolution: Family Life and Political Behaivor in Mao's China. By XIAOWEI ZANG. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2000. xiv, 133 pp. $55.00.
Based on the author's interviews with 57 Chinese students and immigrants in the San Francisco Bay Area, this sociological study examines the interplay of "caste" and "class" and its impact on people's political behavior in the PRC. The classification system that Mao's government used to label citizens and predict their political attitudes by their pre-1949 family class status is defined in this book as a "caste" system with "red" categories such as industrial workers and poor and lower-middle peasants on top and "black" ones like landlords and capitalists at bottom. "Class," on the other hand, refers to post-1949 family economic status based on income and occupation. In Professor Zang's configuration, the overlapping of caste with class resulted in a dual identity for every citizen in a nine-category "socioeconomic status system" which consisted of three castes (upper, middle, lower), each containing within itself three classes (again upper, middle, lower). Focusing exclusively on the experiences of the middle class and lower class children in both the upper and lower castes, the author argues that the dual status, especially its "class" (that is, economic) component, of each family typically dictated the pattern of its children's political behavior. Children of the "upper caste middle class" (of middle-ranking officials, for instance) were more politically active than their lower class...