This chapter examines how political forces shape generational consciousness and identity through the experience of youth who came of age under Mao’s rule. Focusing on the Red Guard Movement and the Sent-Down Movement, it compares two pivotal moments that mobilized millions yet produced divergent generational trajectories. The Red Guards, driven by fervent revolutionary idealism, briefly embodied an intense but transient generational consciousness that dissolved amid political disillusionment and internal fragmentation. The sent-down youth (zhiqing), by contrast, gradually forged a more enduring generational identity through shared experiences of displacement,labor, and collective memory. The chapter argues that while political events can ignite generational consciousness, the endurance of generational identity ultimately depends on the afterlife of experience—how it is remembered, reinterpreted, and woven into cultural and institutional narratives.