Education, Re-Education, and the Cultural Revolution Theme Analysis

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress takes place during China's "Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside" movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which sought to "re-educate" young intellectuals by removing them from their urban homes and sending them to rural areas to work and learn from the peasants. The narrator states that Chairman Mao Zedong's reasons for sending Chinese youth to the countryside were somewhat unclear, as individuals like Luo and the narrator, whom the Chinese government classified as "intellectuals," weren't intellectuals by any stretch of the imagination—they had actually only completed a middle school education. With this cruel irony front and center, the novel sets out to explore what education means when knowledge itself is stifled, and what the consequences are of trying to mandate how individuals and populations behave and think.

The peasants in charge of Luo and the narrator's re-education are mostly illiterate. They live simple lives and perform backbreaking work; in short, they are exactly what the communist regime wants the population to be like. Though Luo is obviously against the government's idea of re-education, he wishes to perform his own brand of re-education on the Little Seamstress and transform her from a beautiful but simple country girl into a cultured young woman worthy of his affections. This, of course, backfires when the Little Seamstress takes what she's learned from hearing Luo and the narrator read Balzac to her and decides to leave the mountain and Luo behind. The Little Seamstress undergoes the exact opposite of the government's idea of re-education, as do Luo and the narrator. Their exposure to banned Western literature provides them with ideas and goals that run completely counter to the communist project of the country.

Though the narrator, Luo, and Four-Eyes are the only official recipients of re-education in the novel, the narrator continues to suggest that the idea of re-education isn't unique to them. The entire mountain is in the process of its own form of re-education, as it once thrived on the opium trade and, thanks to the Cultural Revolution, is now forced to embrace the idealized life of the poor, noble peasant. While the narrator doesn't go into great detail about what the villagers' lives were like before the Cultural Revolution, he suggests that they weren't thrilled to switch from cultivating opium to other crops. The villagers never fully bought into the ideals espoused by the government, as illustrated by their "quiet anarchy" when the village headman leaves for a month. Though the headman's motives aren't detailed, it's suggested that he cares more about maintaining and exerting his power than about either opium or enforcing communism in his village. Essentially, he doesn't seem to care where his power comes from; he just cares that he has it. This shows that the images of both re-education and the "noble peasant" are just that: images, not actual reality. The villagers, and the headman in particular, seem far more committed to obtaining and keeping power than they are to ideals espoused by the government. Though the Cultural Revolution was intended to shape the Chinese way of life by educating or re-educating citizens to fit a certain ideal, the novel suggests that attempting to shape people to embody a particular vision is a difficult or impossible task, and that controlling what happens as a result of another person's education is equally impossible.