Since coming to power in 1949, Mao Tse-tung has time and again extolled the discipline to be learned from manual labor. Over the years, China has periodically conducted "down to the countryside" campaigns, in which millions of city residents go off to work on farms for six months to three years or more. During the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, a party member's willingness to "integrate" himself with the masses by doing manual labor became a test of his ideological purity. Professors, government bureaucrats and white-collar workers all spent time, often punitive, in...
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