Wolf Totem

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In 1969, a young Chinese intellectual from Beijing answered Chairman Mao’s call for city dwellers to go “up to the mountains and down to the countryside,” joining as many as a hundred like-minded youngsters in traveling to one of China’s most remote, most “primitive” spots: north-central Inner Mongolia. While most of the fifteen to twenty million young urbanites who were sent out of the cities to be “rusticated” dreamed constantly of going home and, insofar as possible, shunned close attachments to their rural hosts, Jiang Rong did in fact learn from and befriend the herdsmen with whom he lived and worked. In all, he spent more than a decade as a shepherd on the sparsely populated Olonbulag, a fictional setting in the Ujimchin Banner, a hardscrabble existence in a place where life is unimaginably hard on all its inhabitants, man and beast.

Despite its remote location and hostile environment, Inner Mongolia was not spared the excesses of the disastrous Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), when the nation was on war footing, arrayed against domestic enemies of the state and international enemies of the nation, real and imagined. The “four olds” (old thought, old culture, old customs, and old practices) were under attack, targeting, in particular, ideologically “backward” members of superstitious and conservative rural societies. When they weren’t working to bring down important political, military, and cultural figures, Red Guard factions spent their time tormenting ordinary citizens. Military organizational schemes replaced traditional tribal order, military terminology was in vogue, and military commanders, competent or not, were placed in charge of production activities.

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