Banished to the Great Northern Wilderness

After 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 labor farm archives, interviews, and memoirs to provide a remarkable look at the suffering and complex psychological world of these banished Beijing intellectuals. Wang's use of 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 remold the intellectuals, and he illuminates the strategies the exiles used to deal with camp officials and improve their chances of survival.

Ning Wang is Associate Professor of History at Brock University.

Banished to the Great Northern Wilderness turns out to be a piece of scholarship impressively grounded in a serious engagement with original materials.

This is a marvelously level-headed book. Until the concluding chapter, Ning Wang is restrained in describing horrors on the individual level and devastation in terms of the impact on the general society. But finally the pulling of punches ends, and we are asked to try to imagine 'the waste of human talent.'

Wang's exploration of political exiles in Mao's China incorporates his exhaustive research into a truly beautiful narrative, full of individual voices, that is every bit as raw and moving as Yan's novel. The careful but deeply thoughtful readings of sources—recollections from captives, cadres, and guards, supplemented by official documents—makes Banished to the Great Northern Wilderness indispensable reading for anyone who wants to understand the history of the People's Republic of China (PRC).

Ning Wang's work inspires us to rethink thought and labour reform in China as part of a larger global history that continues to evolve.

Wang Ning has presented us with an extremely rich study of beidahuang, and the transparency of his deployment of sources, as well as his acknowledgement of their limits, ensures this book will remain relevant and valuable in the long term.... Given the details he has from such a range of survivors of beidahuang, Wang's book is highly relevant to broader questions of how political prisoners experienced their sentence and life after release, on transitional justice, and on trauma and memory.... The first authoritative work on the topic.

A fine piece of scholarly work contributing to knowledge of life within Chinese penal camps. The reading is essential to students and scholars of political banishment, China’s labor reformatory, Chinese intellectuals and the Communist Party, and China studies under Mao in general.