Zuoya Cao, an ex-zhiqing, offers and informative study of the novels and short stories about the lives of zhiqing, Chinese urban youth who were dispatched to the backward rural area to live the peasants' life during the second phase of the Cultural Revolution. Giving a full view of zhiqing writing from the late 1970s to the late 1990s, this book covers the works, authors, themes, characters and plots of the zhiqing literary genre. By focusing on each of the following themes of zhiqing literature - heroism and idealism, suffering and internal transformation, the loss of innocence or the moral dilemma, love and cultural difference, sexual and spiritual oppression, zhiqing/peasant relations, awareness of the relationship between man and nature and the conflict between the desire to leave the countryside and the attachment to it - this work addresses the question of how the zhiqing view their rustication. This exploration demonstrates the emotional aspect of the movement and the humanistic significance of the zhiqing's experience by magnifying the aspects of human nature, potentiality, relations and existence.