As early as the mid-1950s, Chairman Mao Zedong, leader of the Chinese Communist Party, advocated sending young, educated people, considered pro-bourgeois, from the cities to the countryside to learn from the proletariat farmers and workers there. It is estimated that around 16 million urban youths were sent to rural villages for “reeducation.”
Image 1: A letter of summoning youth going to the countryside (left), and food coupons used in rural reeducation communities (right)
This was one facet of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which reached its height in the late 1960s. Facing the harshness of a life “sent down” to the rural communities, more and more intellectuals sought to escape China. In South China, thousands of these refugees found their way to Hong Kong and Macao, some by fleeing across the border—at the risk of being shot or captured—and some by swimming across the bay in the dead of night.
The Tan Jialo collection includes seven hand-painted maps indicating escape routes from Communist China to the free world, three man-made compasses used by the escapees, and miscellaneous materials related to the construction of two memorial monuments in New Jersey to honor those who died or disappeared during the escape.
Image 2: Fragment from a hand-painted map showing an escape route from Guangdong to Hong Kong
These materials provide compelling supplements to Hoover’s existing collections on the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the Communist Chinese political movement, and other personal papers of Chinese individuals who experienced the political turmoil of the 1960s and the 1970s, such as Li Rui, Lin Zhao, Wong Fook Hing, Xie Dingguo, and Chang You-ling.
