China Labour Bulletin appears in the following article. Copyright remains with the original publisher.
December 23, 2007
By David Lague
Beijing. In the autumn of 1977, as relative calm returned to China after the decade-long chaos of the Cultural Revolution, An Ping was laboring in the countryside where she had been sent, like millions of other young people from the cities, to learn from the peasants.
For two years she had fed pigs and chickens and tended crops on a commune outside Beijing. It was a time of unrelieved misery for the army general's daughter, bitterly cold in unheated dormitories through the winter and always hungry. And there was the dread that life offered no other prospect.
Though Mao had died the year before, and the radical Gang of Four, who had directed the Cultural Revolution in his name, were in custody, there was little sign that she and other "sent-down" urban youths would be allowed to return home.
"For the first time I felt life was not worth it," said An, who was 19 then. "If you had asked me to go on living this kind of life, I would rather die."
Then, in late October, village authorities relayed the news that China would hold its first nationwide university entrance examinations since 1965, shortly before academic pursuits were subordinated to political struggle. In acknowledgement of more than a decade of missed opportunity, candidates ranging in age from 13 to 37 were allowed to take the exam.
For An, and a whole generation consigned to the countryside, it was the first chance to escape what seemed like a life sentence of tedium and hardship. A pent-up reservoir of talent and ambition was released as 5.7 million people took the two-day exam in November and December, in what may have been the most competitive scholastic test in modern Chinese history.
The 4.7 percent of test takers who won admission to universities - 273,000 people - became known as the Class of '77, widely regarded in China as the best and brightest of their time. (By comparison, 58 percent of this year's 9 million exam takers won university places.)
Now, three decades later, the powerful combination of intellect and determination has taken many of this elite group to the top in politics, education, art and business. Last October, one successful applicant who had gone on to study law and economics at Peking University, Li Keqiang, was brought into the Chinese Communist Party's decision-making Politburo Standing Committee, where he is being watched as a possible successor to President Hu Jintao or Prime Minister Wen Jiabao.
"They were a very bright bunch, and they knew it," said Robin Munro, research director for the Hong Kong-based China Labour Bulletin, who was a British exchange student at Peking University in 1978, when these freshmen arrived. "They were the first students in 10 years let into university on merit, and they were going places, and they were in a hurry."
But back in 1977, most had only a few desperate weeks to prepare for the examination that would change their lives. It was especially daunting for those who had been cut off from schooling for years. All over China, students found themselves clearing their heads, scrambling to find textbooks, seeking out former tutors and straining to recall half-forgotten formulas.
An, now the New York-based director of public relations for Committee of 100, the Chinese-American lobby group, immediately exaggerated the seriousness of a back injury and took a month's medical leave, which she devoted to crash study.
"I had to succeed," she said.
The examination tested not just academic subjects, but political correctness as well.
Han Ximing, now 50 and a Chinese literature professor in Nanjing, felt she was already well prepared to handle any political questions from careful study of the party line in official newspapers distributed to her production team in rural Jiangsu Province.
"It was the voice of the central government and usually good news," she said. For years, the papers had been filled with criticism of Deng Xiaoping. "That was a big topic," she said. "Actually, I had no idea why Deng was supposed to be so bad."
In reality, it was the return of Deng, the veteran Communist leader, to a position of power in Beijing after the fall of the Gang of Four that led to the reinstatement of the annual exam, and a return to the pragmatism that would soon ignite decades of explosive economic growth.
Among those who have assumed positions of power, aside from Li of the Politburo, are Bo Xilai, minister of commerce and party secretary of Chongqing, China's largest municipality; Zhou Qiang, governor of Hunan Province; Wang Yi, party secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and former ambassador to Japan; Xia Yong, director general of the National Administration for Protection of State Secrets; and Jin Liqun, vice president of the Asian Development Bank.