During his weekly NPR podcast, “How I Built This with Guy Raz,” Raz often asks about how much the entrepreneurs he’s speaking with attribute their success to luck.
Many own up to the chance happening of good events easing their path, and some to bad events steering them in a different direction. The political system governing the place of their births, or the timing of those births, never seems to come up. Yet, “the accident of birth” is usually fundamental to one’s fortune.
Chautauquans who were middle schoolers between 1962 and 1979 may wish to thank their lucky stars that they weren’t among the more than 18 million literate Chinese urban teenagers – roughly half of an entire generation — taken away from their families, schools and communities.
Corralled into one of the People’s Republic of China’s cruelest “re-education” programs — spearheaded by People’s Republic of China founder and Communist Party Chair Mao Zedong — they were deported en masse, exiled to remote rural villages, and forced to learn from peasants.
One of these “Sent-Down Youth” was Xi Jinping, China’s current president. Others are members of its Politburo.
At 3 p.m. Saturday in the Hall of Philosophy, as part of the Chautauqua Women’s Club’s Contemporary Issues Forum, international lawyer and Chinese and Japanese historian Robin Radin will give a talk titled “Mao’s Hijacked Generation: What Can We Learn?”
Radin joined the late Wang Youfen — originator, chief editor, and translator of Mao’s Hijacked Generation — in editing this book of firsthand accounts of what 42 of these teenagers experienced and witnessed while in exile.
“I was driven to undertake this project by the conviction that the world needs to know about a large-scale deportation in China which, although not as deadly as the gulags of the Soviet Union or the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, disrupted the lives of and had a lifelong impact on a whole generation of Chinese urban youth,” Youfen wrote in the preface to the book.
At CIF, Radin will discuss his partnership with Youfen, whom he describes as “a leading Chinese dissident intellectual on his life’s final project to publish a book about one of Mao Zedong’s most extreme social engineering programs, which … deeply affected the way Chinese people think and behave today.”
Author Amy Tan, a longtime friend of one of Radin’s brother’s, inspired him to travel to a remote tribal village in southwest China to meet the author of one of the stories in Mao’s Hijacked Generation.
Tan had written an article about this inland village of Dong people in southwestern China for National Geographic Magazine’s May 2008 special issue, “China: Inside the Dragon.” Others have posted videos on YouTube, including “Past Perfect in Present Tense: Dimen village, Guizhou, China.”
Radin grew up outside Boston, in Malden, Massachusetts. He said that in 1959, he went to college at the University of Chicago, “which is its own special world of intellectual absorption and distraction and freedom.”
Feeling “free to figure out how to discover the world, with some influence of an older brother who was an excellent student of Greek and classical philosophy, and Greek civilization,” Radin said he followed his example so that he could “read Plato in the original.”
Then, having been “persuaded to study the roots of Asian intellectual foundations, I took a course in classical Chinese in order to read Confucius in the original, (including) the ‘Classic of Filial Piety’ (and other) concepts of Confucian thought,” he said.
For a while during college, Radin was a philosophy major and the poetry editor of The Phoenix magazine. He also participated in Bread Loaf, Middlebury College’s annual writer’s conference in Vermont.
Then he took a course in Japanese literature and translation, taught by Edwin McClellan, which he said strengthened his interest in Japan and influenced his ultimate decision to choose Japanese studies over Chinese. McClellan had been asked to create Chicago’s Japanese Study program in 1959, Radin’s freshman year.
Another of Radin’s mentors, who has remained a close friend, was Jay Rubin. Radin said that at the time, Rubin was one of the University of Chicago’s two Ph.D. candidates in Japanese literature. For 18 years he taught at the University of Washington in Seattle, before moving east to teach at Harvard University.
“(Rubin) became heavily involved in the book,” Radin said. “His wife insisted that his name not be on it because of fear or whatever from the Chinese. He did a complete, final polish editing of all of the stories. He’s a Harvard professor, so the book is done with the highest level of expertise and care.”
Radin added that “(t)hese relationships are key inflection points in my life, starting with getting on to the track of studying Japanese and running out of time to get a (Ph.D.) degree.”
After earning his Bachelor of Arts degree, Radin pursued East Asian history at the University of California at Berkeley, taking nearly as many courses in Chinese as in Japanese. In 1969, he earned his master’s degree in Japanese history and passed the comprehensive exams, allowing him to write a doctoral dissertation.
A “lucrative and lavish” Ford Foundation Foreign Area Fellowship enabled Radin to conduct doctoral research as a visiting foreign scholar at Kyoto University for two years, from 1969 to 1971.
“An honorary Fulbright (scholarship) got me an invitation to go to South Korea,” Radin said. “I discovered that part of Asia.”
Radin joined the history faculty at the University of Miami in 1974, where he created and directed its Japanese Studies Program. Two years later, he veered away from academic history and entered Harvard Law School, earning his J.D. in 1979.
“I was influenced by another mentor figure, Jerome Cohen … who helped bring me to law school (and is) a pioneer who helped develop the whole field of Chinese law,” Radin said.
Faced with “many choices” upon graduation, his inclination was to integrate his Japanese background with the practice of law.
“I didn’t know how to do that, but I had some models,” Radin said. “Jerry Cohen was training the generation of lawyers who helped facilitate the engagement of China after the opening in 1972, and to set up a law firm. He was there in 1979.”
International corporate securities fit well with that model, and Radin went to work for a leading firm in New York City — Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen and Hamilton.
“It was a firm that was created uniquely for international practice and is renowned,” he said. “… It’s a fantastic, powerhouse firm. I was there for three years.”
For over five years, from 1982 to 1987, Radin served in New York City as the chief counsel for Marubeni, a large Japanese general trading firm. Among many other things, he said he was involved in closing an Alaskan gold mine.
“And then I was recruited by Morgan Stanley in 1987 to be their chief counsel in Asia-Pacific, based in Tokyo,” he said.
Radin worked as the head of legal affairs for eight years before moving to Hong Kong to be Credit Suisse First Boston’s general counsel.
Eight years later, in 1996, Harvard invited Radin to return as a visiting scholar and a senior associate of its Program on U.S.-Japan Relations.
From 1998 to 2003, he held the position of associate director of Harvard Law School’s Program on International Financial Systems, and immediately began co-founding its annual Japan-U.S. Financial Symposium “to help persuade the Japanese government to reform its financial systems.”
During this period, from 1997 to 2002, Radin founded and was the senior executive of White Gold Mountain Partners, a joint venture between a small U.S. group and North Korea.
“I went three times to North Korea and helped lead a group to negotiate and develop a joint venture business relationship — the one and only,” Radin said. “The business was in the international distribution of magnesium products” involved in the production of steel. “North Korea has a rich vein called White Gold Mountain.”
Radin was also a co-founder and senior executive of Toura LLC, “a mobile app technology platform company” currently operating in the United States and Europe, and a co-founder and the CEO of CropTech LLC, a biotech company.
Mao’s Hijacked Generation “is tied to my long interest in studying China and conveying that interest to students and others along the way, and to fulfilling my commitment (to Youfen) through publication as a joint venture,” Radin said. “… He was one of the people in my life who I’ve admired and adored as a friend.”
Because the United States’ “relationship with China going forward is perhaps more important than anywhere else in the world,” Radin said, “(our) investment in continuing to understand China is important.”
