In 1969, Qian Zhongshu was sent to a cadre school under Mao's Cultural Revolution. Those cadre schools aimed to "reform" intellectuals like Zhongshu and Jiang through manual labor. The couple was forced to dig wells and farm at the cadre school. Yang, an author and a playwright, chronicled this experience in "Six Chapters of Life in a Cadre School: Memoirs from China's Cultural Revolution." Anyone else will be sent, as Zhongshu and Jiang were, to "re-education" camps, farms, or factories.