CHINA-IDEOLOGY
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Some scholars have criticised a government-approved exhibition that opened to the public on July 1 at the Beijing National Stadium and will run for two to three years. Admission is free for "sent-down youths". The exhibition is about the policy of sending millions of young people to work in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution and said the event puts a positive spin on a traumatic period in the nation's history. The organiser of the exhibition, Pan Zhonglin, said there are now more than 100 exhibitions about "sent-down youths" all over the country. He added that unlike most private exhibitions on the topic which tended to dwell on the suffering of the young people, the event in Beijing attempts to "spread positive energy". He said the exhibition had been approved at a "national level", but denied it represented the official view of the policy among this generation of the country's leadership. Pictures of youngsters who took part in the programme and later became celebrities, business tycoons and politicians, are displayed near the end of the exhibition, which closes with Xi Jinping's first-hand account on how he benefitted from being a "sent-down youth".
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