This is The Guardian.

The Truth about China's Cultural Revolution by Tania Branigan.

From a distance, you might have mistaken them for teenagers, though they were in late middle age.

It wasn't just the mini skirts and heels on their slim frames, or the ponytails and flaming lipstick,

but the girlish way the women held hands, stroked arms, massaged shoulders, smooth sleeves and straightened back straps, giddy with affection.

Their makeup was heavy, with boldly penciled brows, and their long hair tinned at black or dyed brassy blonde.

Recreating a youth that had never been there to enjoy.

Auntie Huang was wistful, as we watched a couple of students stroll past in the grounds of Chongqing University.

Green with palms and willows and great thickets of bamboo.

We had made ourselves at home in a little pavilion set upon the lake.

Just like today's young people, I wanted to do many things, like go to university, but I couldn't.

She told me.

I was 18. I felt there was no hope. We had no hope at all.

One person would cry, and then everyone would start. It was dejection, despair.

In late 1968, the train and bus stations of Chinese cities filled with sobbing adolescence and frightened parents.

The authorities had decreed that teenagers, deployed by Mao Zedong as the shock troops of the Cultural Revolution,

were to begin new lives in the countryside.

A tide of youth swept towards impoverished villages.

Auntie Huang and her friends were among them. 17 million teenagers,

enough to populate a nation of their own, were sent hundreds of miles away, to places with no electricity or running water, some unreachable by road.

The party corded, going up to the mountains and down to the countryside, indicating its lofty justification and the humble soil in which these students were to set down routes.

Some were as young as 14, many had never spent a night away from home.

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