Sent-down youth

"Educated youth" redirects here. For Ye Xin's novel, see Educated Youth (novel).

Chinese names
Educated Youth
Traditional Chinese	知識青年
Simplified Chinese	知识青年
Literal meaning	intellectual youth
Transcriptions Standard Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin zhīshi qīngnián
Zhiqing
Chinese	知青
Literal meaning	[contraction]
Transcriptions Standard Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin zhīqīng
Sent-down Youth
Chinese	下放青年
Literal meaning	transferred-down youth
Transcriptions Standard Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin xiàfàng qīngnián

Sent-down, rusticated, or educated youth (Chinese: 下乡青年), also known as the zhiqing, were young people who left the urban districts of the People's Republic of China (willingly or under coercion) to live and work in rural areas as part of the Down to the Countryside Movement from the 1950s to the end of the Cultural Revolution. Most young people who went to the rural communities had received a primary- or secondary-school education, and only a small minority had reached the post-secondary (or university) level.

Prelude (1953–1967)

In the years immediately following the founding of the People's Republic of China (PRC), the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) central leadership largely promoted primary education. From 1949 to 1952, the number of elementary schools increased by 50 percent; student enrollment more than doubled, from 23,490,000 to 51,100,000. Although the number of middle-school students increased by 140 percent over the same period, elementary-school students outnumbered their middle-school counterparts twenty to one. In response to the severe disproportion between the numbers of elementary and middle-school students and the overheated development of primary education in the early 1950s (especially in rural areas), the Ministry of Education made sweeping cuts in elementary and middle-school admissions in 1953. This policy had a large impact on elementary and middle-school graduates and educated youths; over two million could not go on to higher education in the same year.

Rural educated youth

Rural educated youths were the worst affected. The CCP initiated the First Five-Year Plan (1953–1957) in 1953, following the Soviet-style development of heavy industry in urban areas. The Stalinist model required the PRC to develop more efficient ways to extract resources from agriculture to subsidize industrialization. The CCP's central leadership introduced centralized requisition for grain from villages and rationing in cities, better known as the "unified purchasing and selling of grain" system or tonggou tongxiao 統購統銷. The system required peasants to sell "surplus" grain to the state at a fixed low price while providing city residents with guaranteed rations, which widened the gap between urban and rural China.

Because of the urban-rural gap, many educated youths considered going on to higher education (and acquiring a job in the city) as the primary way out of the countryside and the peasantry. A rural youth wrote to his elder brother in 1955, "I failed (to go on to higher education) ... I could not calm down, because it mattered to my youth, even to my life ... I would rather make a living by picking up trash in the city than stay in the countryside!"

Some rural educated youth turned to working opportunities in cities. However, the PRC's gradual nationalization of the state's private sector, the reform of handicraft in cities (and the reform of agriculture, known collectively as the "Three Socialist Reforms" (Chinese: 三大社會主義改造; pinyin: sān dà shèhuì zhǔyì gǎizào; 1953–1956), and the accumulation of workers during the First Five-Year Plan left a large unemployed population in cities. The PRC's urgent, open-ended need for as many peasants (food producers, with more "surplus" grain to be extracted) and as few consumers (city residents) as possible made rural educated youth's countryside-to-city movement unfavorable to policymakers.

The CCP's central leadership institutionalized the two-tiered household registration (the hukou system) in 1958. Initially designed as a surveillance tool for police to monitor the population to prevent counterrevolutionary sabotage in the early 1950s, the post-1958 hukou system assigned every individual in China a rural (agricultural) or urban (non-agricultural) registration by residence. The classification system aimed to fix everyone in place. While city residents (individuals with an urban or non-agricultural hukou) were entitled to guaranteed food rations, housing, health care and education, rural (agricultural) households were bound by control of their physical mobility and were expected to be self-sufficient. The 1953 reform of primary education permanently ended most rural, educated youth opportunities for upward social mobility.

Experiences

In the face of pressure from educated youth who could not go on to higher education and mass un-enrollment in cities, the CCP's central leadership saw redirecting rural educated youth to return to their place of origin as reasonable. On December 3, 1953, the People's Daily proposed a plan to organize educated youth to participate in agricultural production in the outskirts of cities and towns and in rural areas. This editorial originated the Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside Movement (Chinese: 上山下鄉運動; pinyin: shàngshān xià xiāng yùndòng). By late 1954, Liaoning, Jilin, Shaanxi, Qinghai, and Gansu provinces organized about 240,000 educated youths to participate in agricultural production, most of which came from rural areas.

Participation in agricultural production meant more than cultivating land, growing crops, and related manual labor. As part of the "Three Socialist Reforms", the PRC's 1950s agricultural collectivization campaign merged individual peasant households into agricultural producers' cooperatives (Chinese: 農村合作社; pinyin: nóngcūn hézuòshè), better known as the three-tiered, rural production unit (people's commune, production brigade, and production team after 1958) for collective production and distribution in the countryside. All adult members would receive work points (Chinese: 工分; pinyin: gōngfēn) for the amount of labor they provided the cooperative, measured by working hours. At the end of each year, agricultural producers' cooperatives paid members with a proportion of the harvest and cash from grain sold to the state according to work points, age, and sex. The large-scale 1950s agricultural collectivization in China's countryside created a high demand for educated individuals with some mathematical training to be collective accountants and work-point recorders. In 1955, Mao Zedong praised 32 rural educated youths who returned to the countryside to work for local agricultural producers' cooperatives: "All educated youths like them (those of rural origins) who could work in the countryside ought to be happy to do so. The countryside is a vast world where much can be accomplished."

Redirecting rural youth to return to their place of origin relieved, but never resolved, the number of elementary and middle-school graduates who could neither go on to higher education nor find work in cities. By 1955, Shanghai had over 300,000 unemployed educated youths. Inspired by the Soviet Virgin Lands Campaign, the Communist Youth League of China (CYLC) organized model youth volunteer pioneer teams (Chinese: 青年志願墾荒隊; pinyin: qīngnián zhìyuàn kěnhuāng duì) in 1955 to establish the Chinese version of Komsomolsk in remote, mountainous regions and borderlands. A youth volunteer pioneer team usually consisted of dozens to hundreds of youths which included a small number of urban and rural educated youths and urban workers, and primarily young peasants from the outskirts of cities and towns; most of them were CYLC members. In 1956, about 210,000 youths participated in the Chinese Virgin Lands Campaign. Compared to urban youths, the CCP's central leadership and local cadres responsible for organizing youth volunteer pioneer teams considered rural youth in general as more experienced in agricultural production and stronger.

Another underrepresented subgroup of educated youths was the border-support youth (Chinese: 支邊青年; pinyin: zhībiān qīngnián): male and female party cadres, young peasants, workers, technicians, veterans, and educated youths, primarilyly from rural areas. Instead of returning to their places of origin in the countryside, these rural educated youths were organized (dongyuan) to go to borderlands "go up to mountains", Chinese: 上山; pinyin: shàngshān). Rural educated youths were 18.6 percent of all border-support youth who arrived at Xinjiang in 1961, and 17.5 percent in 1962. Unlike the self-funded return journeys of rural educated youths and the CYLC-organized youth volunteer pioneer teams which depended on their members' personal (or family) funding and public donations, border-support youth relied on central (such as transportation, clothes, meal allowance en route, and medical aid) and local government funding for resettlement. In 1959 and 1960, the national treasury appropriated over 200 million yuan fot the resettlement of border-support youth.

Throughout the 1950s, the Up to Mountains and Down to the Countryside Movement was largely intermittent and closely correlated with the ups and downs of the PRC's economy and admission policies. Educated youths who had gone to the countryside would return to cities when employment and admission opportunities increased, and fresh graduates would remain in cities. The industrial over-expansion during the Great Leap Forward (GLF) added over 20 million jobs in cities in 1958. Since settling in cities when possible has been the most-desired option (providing a promising future), tens of millions of youths moved – or returned – to cities.

The unprecedented large-scale redundancy and decline in school admission generated a severe population issue in post-GLF PRC cities. From late 1962 to early 1963, the CCP institutionalized an educated-youth resettlement policy and established a central resettlement group (Chinese: 中央安置領導小組; pinyin: zhōngyāng ānzhì lǐngdǎo xiǎozǔ) to oversee the campaign. In a meeting from June to July 1963, Zhou Enlai demanded that each province, city and autonomous region make a fifteen-year resettlement plan (1964–1979) for urban educated youths. An August 19, 1963, central resettlement group report explained the reasoning behind Zhou's proposed 15-year time span: "Children born within fourteen years after the Liberation (1949–1963) would reach working-age in the next fifteen years ... It was estimated that there would be around a million middle school graduates who could not go on to higher education every year ... For this reason, the party's central leadership demand that each province, city and autonomous region make a fifteen-year plan (1964–1979) that is centered on the resettlement of urban educated youths who reached working age." In an October meeting, Zhou increased the number of rural and urban educated youths to be resettled to the countryside in the next eighteen years to 35 million. He warned that the number would increase further if birth-control measures in cities were poorly implemented. Zhou did not mention rural educated youth in particular, indicating that the CCP's central leadership expected to continue redirecting most rural elementary and middle-school graduates to return to their places of origin.

Among major literary genres during the Cultural Revolution were novels about the experiences of sent-down youth. They included novels written by the youths themselves, such as Zhang Kangkang's Dividing Line (1975) and Zhang Changgong's Youth (1973).

Resettlement and inequality

Following the model of resettling border-support youths in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the PRC gave each resettled educated youth an allowance to cover their resettlement expenses – including transportation, home-building, food, farming tools, and furniture – in the transitional period between their departure and their first "paycheck" after arrival (usually at the end of each year). Urban educated youth who resettled on state-owned farms – agricultural farms (農場; nóngchǎng), tree plantations (林場; línchǎng) or fish farms (漁場; yúchǎng, known collectively as 插場; chā chǎng) – received an average of ¥883, ¥1,081 and ¥1,383, respectively, in 1964; the average resettlement allowance for those who resettled on collectively-owned production teams (生產隊; shēngchǎn duì, known as 插隊; chāduì), was one-fifth of chā chǎng (around ¥200). The allowance also varied by location (¥225 in northern China and ¥185 in southern China in 1964, and ¥250 and ¥230 in 1965) and the distance between departure and destination; those who resettled in another province (跨省安置; kuà shěng ānzhì) would receive an extra ¥20 for transportation. Rural educated youth received ¥50 for their return journey to the countryside.

Urban-educated youth preferred state-owned farms or chā chǎng over collectively-owned production teams or chāduì. Those who resettled on state-owned farms had a higher resettlement allowance and received salary-based monthly payments from central and local financial allocations, considered better than the production teams' end-of-year distribution system; the latter income varied with the local situation and annual harvest. State-owned farm employees considered themselves to have a higher political status than production-team members and peasants. The perceived gaps between workers and peasants, urban and rural areas, and manual and mental labor (later known collectively as the "Three Difference" or 三大差別; sān dà chābié) persisted, impacting decisions or reactions to PRC policies. A primary propaganda slogan adopted by the CCP's central leadership to promote the Up to Mountains and Down to the Countryside Movement during the Cultural Revolution was to eliminate the Three Differences. Another form of cha chang, resettling in the Production and Construction Corps (生產建設兵團; shēngchǎn jiànshè bīngtuán) as soldiers in borderlands, became popular among urban-educated youth because being a soldier was considered to have a better political future (zhengzhi qiantu). However, the PRC sent 870,000 of 1,290,000 urban-educated youth (67 percent) resettled from 1962 to 1966 to production teams due to financial concerns. Over 8.7 million rural-educated youth returned to the countryside during the same period.

Return home or exile

On May 16, 1966, an expanded session of a CCP Politburo meeting approved Mao Zedong's agenda and political declaration of the Cultural Revolution, later known as the 16 May Notification. In August, Mao met with over a million Red Guards from across the country who gathered in and around Tiananmen Square. Envisioning a nationwide revolution, the party's leadership announced in September that the state would provide all revolutionary students and faculty a free ride to Beijing and living expenses en route. Benefiting from their location and connections, Beijing- and Tianjin- (urban) educated youths who resettled in production teams on the outskirts of major cities were among the first to be informed.

As the news spread, more sent-down or urban-educated youths followed. Some responded to the party leadership's call and united (chuanlian, 串連) to "revolt" (zaofan, 造反) and "return to cities to make revolution" (huicheng nao geming, 回城鬧革命). In the meanwhile, many also chose to return to cities because that they had conflicts with local cadres and peasants. Some urban-educated youths with "good" political or family backgrounds (zhengzhi beijing) considered themselves more "revolutionary" than local cadres, and demanded that the latter to resign during the 1963–1965 Socialist Education Movement. When the Cultural Revolution began, local cadres launched counterattacks and forced resettled urban-educated youth to leave.

Others experienced discrimination by local cadres and peasants. Several female urban-educated youths who resettled on production teams in Inner Mongolia reported in 1965 that they were prohibited from contacting local "poor and lower-middle class peasants" (pin-xia-zhong nong, 貧下中農) due to their "bad" family backgrounds. Even those not in the "Five Black Categories" (hei wulei, 黑五类) were subjected to bias and abuses. A production brigade in Zengcheng, Guangzhou prohibited all urban-educated youth and "bad elements" (huai fenzi, 壞分子) of the Five Black Categories from participating in mass gatherings. Shanghai sent-down youth who resettled in the province of Anhui were expelled and repatriated to Shanghai by the Huangshan tea and tree plantation as a result of a local class-struggle campaign. Some Shanghai sent-down youths who resettled at the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps reported abuses by local cadres. In some cases, the sent-down youths had to do heavy work in a harsh environment without pay. Abuse of female sent-down youth was worse; some Production and Construction Corps cadres said that "[marriages of female sent-down youths] were only open to members of the Production and Construction Corps" (bingtuan guniang duinei bu duiwai, 兵團姑娘對內不對外). In the face of harsh living and working conditions and threats to personal safety, the Shanghai sent-down youths returned home. A considerable number of urban-educated youths, especially recent arrivals to the countryside, took advantage of a free ride back to the city. Urban-educated youths had more enthusiasm and ability to return to cities than their rural counterparts; they had families (or other supporters) in cities, and were more likely to have a secure livelihood after their return.

Most local state-owned farms and production and construction corps and production teams rarely attempted to prevent urban-educated youths from returning to cities. Most local cadres supported these return journeys and provided supplies, an allowance, or accommodations en route. Cadres in the autonomous region of Guangxi proposed to provide every revolutionary student or faculty, sent-down youth and cadre who participated in the "great networking" a monthly allowance of ¥7 and 45 grain coupons (liang piao 糧票). An urban-educated youth who resettled in Bayan County, Heilongjiang province recalled that "capitalist roaders" (zou zi pai, 走資派; local cadres) encouraged sent-down youth to return to cities and gave each oone ¥300 to cover expenses en route. Most cadres at the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps supported the "great networking" in late 1966, after attempts to prevent urban-educated youth from returning to cities (by setting up checkpoints on main roads) failed.

The "great networking" soon escaped the party leadership's control. It was announced in November 1966 that after 21 November, revolutionary students and faculty would receive a free ride only if they were taking a return trip. The following month, the party's central leadership demanded that all revolutionary students and faculty return home by December 20. By the end of 1966, nearly all educated youth from Shanghai, 70 percent of those from Nanjing, and 90 percent of those from Chengdu returned to cities from the countryside.

Protests

Returned urban-educated youths formed local and inter-regional "rebel" organizations, protested about abuses of educated youth, and demanded that local governments reclaim their non-agricultural welfare. "Rebel" organization leaders were aware of the danger of challenging the Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside movement. Returned sent-down youths tactfully attributed the movement to Liu Shaoqi, who was called a "traitor" and a "capitalist roader" and removed from office as a result of Mao Zedong's attack on him in Bombard the Headquarters-My Big-Character Poster on August 5, 1966.

In 1957, the party's central leadership entrusted Liu Shaoqi to promote the Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside movement in Hebei, Henan, Hubei, Hunan and Shandong provinces. In a series of talks, Liu admitted that the state faced temporary urban unemployment and admissions problems and encouraged urban- and rural-educated youth who could not go on to higher education to participate in agricultural production and become the first generation of educated "new peasants" (xinshi nongmin 新式農民). Liu addressed most educated youths' biggest concern (the future), and promised that educated "new peasants" would have promising lives. According to Liu, educated "new peasants" could earn local peasants' trust by learning agricultural skills from them. Trusted by the local population for their personalities and abilities, Liu concluded that educated "new peasants" could become local cadres several years after their arrival in the countryside and said that the state would also need educated "new peasants" to promote rural development in the near future.

Liu Shaoqi's interpretations of the Up to Mountains and Down to the Countryside movement in 1957 were consistent with the party central leadership's aim to resolve urban unemployment and admissions problems and accelerate rural development. The movement generated massive discontent and social unrest, however, and the demoted Liu became a safe target for the dissatisfaction of returned urban-educated youth. Returned urban-educated youths and their parents gathered in cities which included Guangzhou, Changsha, Wuhan and Shanghai to protest against Liu Shaoqi and his "black talons and teeth" (hei zhaoya, 黑爪牙) abuses. Some "rebel" organizations enlisted members to go back to the countryside to lead local protests against the Up to Mountains and Down to the Countryside movement. Shanghai-educated youth's parents sent a delegation to the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps to "set fire" (dianhuo, 點火; organize protests). Rural-educated youth swarmed into cities, demanding for jobs and the elimination of the urban-rural gap.

Return to the "hometown"

In January 1967, a Japanese newspaper reported the development of a nationwide "rebel" movement. Several days later, on 11 January, the party's central leadership made its first announcement about the return of educated youths since the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. According to the announcement, "capitalist roaders" in the CCP instigated the return of educated youth to cities and their protests. The party's central leadership ordered all formerly-resettled educated youth to return to the countryside and continue participating in agricultural production. An 18 January editorial on said that the return of formerly-resettled educated youth was a "capitalist roader" conspiracy to undermine the country's agricultural production and expand the urban-rural gap. The editorial, which quoted Mao Zedong's 1955 comment about the Up to Mountains and Down to the Countryside movement justify it, encouraged urban-educated youth to "return to [your] hometown (the countryside) and make revolution locally" (da hui laojia qu, jiudi nao geming, 打回老家去，就地鬧革命). The editorial deliberately distorted the meaning of "hometown" (laojia); regardless of educated youth's place of origin, the party's central leadership now ordered them to go to the countryside. These official announcements further incited class struggle. The Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside movement, largely a part of the PRC's economic-development plan during the late 1950s and early 1960s, became a large-scale political movement during the Cultural Revolution.

Cultural Revolution

Origins

Sent-down youth

Sent-down youth in Changli County, Hebei

In early 1966, when the Cultural Revolution began, student Red Guards attacked China's educational system. On 6 June, dozens of seniors from the Beijing No.1 Girls' Middle School proposed the abolition of college-entrance exams. They denounced the "old educational system", which they saw as "encouraging bourgeois ideology" and "helping the restoration of capitalism". The students sent an open letter to Chairman Mao Zedong asking him to end the exams:

"High school graduates should go to the workers, peasants, and soldiers, to unite with the workers and farmers, and to grow in the wind and waves of the Three Revolutionary Movements ... This is a new road, a new road leading to communism. We must, and will certainly be able to, make our proletariat road. Dear Party, Beloved Chairman Mao, the harshest place needs to be dispatched the youth around Chairman Mao. We are ready to go and are just waiting for your order".

More students denounced the college-entrance exams and called for their abolition over the following days. The Chinese Communist Party's central leadership supported the students' proposal. In June, China's State Council announced the postponement of "higher educational institutions' work of recruiting new students". The State Council issued "The Announcement on Reforming Higher Educational Institutions' New Students Recruitment" on 24 July, canceling college-entrance exams.

Because of the student Red Guards' attacks on schools and the central government's approval, students who graduated in 1966 from middle school could not enter high school and those who graduated from high school could not go on to university. As the Cultural Revolution caused industrial and agricultural production to plunge, jobs available to these students were few. The number of students who graduated from middle or high school but could not enter a higher educational institution reached 10 million in 1968. Students who graduated from middle or high school in 1966, 1967, and 1968 were known as lao sanjie ("old three-classes"老三届).

Two major political events during the Cultural Revolution marked the lives of lao sanjie: the Red Guards movement and the Down to the Countryside Movement. Many student Red Guards, realizing that they could not go on to study at universities, became passionate about exploring new opportunities to "unite with the workers and farmers" (与工农相结合) in the second of half of 1966. The idea of joining workers and farmers was taught extensively at schools, and the lao sanjie were familiar with it. Many middle schools had begun to organize students to work in the countryside for part of each semester since 1965, and government propaganda praised youth who labored in the fields. As a result, many lao sanjie initially went to the countryside voluntarily and enthusiastically.

Ten students from Beijing No. 25 High School left the city for Inner Mongolia in 1967. On October 9, before their departure, thousands of people gathered in the Tiananmen Square to send them off. In front of a large portrait of Chairman Mao, the students pledged their allegiance:

"For the great cause to redden the world with Mao Zedong thoughts, we are willing to climb the mountains of sword and go down to the sea of fire. We have taken the first step in accordance with your great instruction, that the intellectuals should unite with the workers and farmers. We will continue walking on this revolutionary path, walking to its end and never turning back."

State media which included People's Daily and Beijing Daily reported the students' departure from Beijing to Inner Mongolia extensively and approvingly, and the event began the Down to the Countryside Movement.

Voluntary, then mandatory

The initial phase of the Down to the Countryside Movement, marked by the October 1967 departure of students from Beijing No. 25 High School, was voluntary. In August 1968, forty-five students from Shanghai were the city's first voluntary delegation to leave for the countryside. The Shanghai government arranged a reception for the students, called "our city's little soldiers" by Jiefang Daily, on the morning of their departure. The municipal government applauded the students' choice, told them to continue learning from Mao's works, to study from the peasants and participate in the class struggle.

The number of students who volunteered to go to the countryside was far smaller, however, than the number of graduates who could neither continue their studies nor find a job. In Beijing, the number of lao sanjie was more than 400,000; until April 1968, only a few thousand of them volunteered to go to the countryside.

From late 1967 to spring 1968, other municipal and provincial government offices began encouraging and organizing students to go to the countryside. On December 12, 1967, the municipal government of Qingdao in Shandong province organized a farewell ceremony to send off the city's first batch of students to the countryside. Less than a month later, on January 4, 1968, the Shandong provincial revolutionary committee held a meeting at which it was requested that all educated youth in the cities go to the countryside. In March, the Heilongjiang provincial revolutionary committee published an announcement prioritizing the sending of graduates to the countryside.

On April 4, 1968, the central government endorsed a second Heilongjiang provincial revolutionary committee announcement stressing that graduates should primarily be assigned to the countryside. Mao and the central government asked local government offices to assign graduated students to suitable places based on "four directions" (the countryside, frontier regions, factories, and mines) and "jiceng (grassroots places, 基层)". The central government's endorsement precipitated local government offices to make greater efforts to send graduates off. Since most factories did not have jobs available and many had halted production because of the Cultural Revolution, local governments mobilized graduates to relocate to the countryside and the frontier.

On April 21, 1968, the Beijing municipal revolutionary committee asked schools to strengthen political and ideological education to change the views of those who did not want to go to the countryside and set up several teams to mobilize the students. Propaganda was used to expedite the mobilization. In July, Several newspapers reprinted the oil painting Chairman Mao Going to Anyuan 毛主席去安源 in July, calling for students to follow Mao's revolution. In Shanghai, the city government set up an office in June to supervise the mobilization. That month, the Shanghai Party Committee organized a large-scale rally to persuade middle- and high-school graduates to go to the countryside.

On August 18, 1968, the People's Daily published commentary commemorating the second anniversary of Mao's first inspection of the Red Guards. According to the article, "Firmly Embarking on the Path of Uniting Workers, Farmers, and Soldiers," one's willingness to go to the countryside to unite farmers and workers demonstrated loyalty to Chairman Mao's revolution. Local governments adopted more forceful measures to persuade students to go to the countryside. Beijing factories did not receive any graduates, and government work teams were assigned to warn students that they would face consequences if they refused to go to the countryside. Children of families considered to have political issues were required to go to the countryside or frontier regions or the families would be treated as class enemies.

On December 22, 1968, the People's Daily published a front-page article praising city residents in Huining County of Gansu province for resettling in the countryside. An editor's note accompanying the article quoted a directive from Mao: "Chairman Mao has recently instructed us that the educated youth must go to the countryside and to receive re-education from the poor, lower and middle peasants." This directive marked the watershed moment when going to the countryside became mandatory for urban middle- and high-school graduates. Rural villages were required to receive and allocate the students. With the publication of Mao's directive, sending educated urban youth to the countryside quickly swept through China. More than 2.6 million urban students were sent to the countryside in 1969, increasing the total number of sent-down youth since 1967 to almost 4.7 million.

Hesitant reception

Although both the central and local governments pushed hard with propaganda campaigns and various strategies to relocate graduated students from the cities to the countryside, some city residents and rural village officials showed ambivalence towards the mandate. Many families in Shanghai tried to negotiate for their children to have the best arrangements. For instance, one father there persuaded the leader of a working team to let the family's two daughters be sent to the same place in Jiangxi Province. Some families in Shanghai tried to have their children sent to nearby provinces in Zhejiang and Jiangsu. And still, some disapproved the down-to-the-countryside mandate. In one factory in Shanghai, 100 study sessions were held in 1969 to persuade the workers to send their children to the countryside. Some Shanghai residents even damaged homes of members of the street party committee who visited families, persuading them to adhere to the mandate. In Shanghai, the families with a working-class background and those who lived in shanty housing neighborhoods were the most difficult to persuade to send their children to the countryside. In summer 1969, at the Shanghai Number 11 Textile Mill, 20 percent of the students, who were children of the factory workers, remained home after being requested to go to the countryside.

One of the reasons it was more difficult to mobilize working-class families was that they had a more privileged class background than the families of intellectuals or those placed into the bad class categories. Their employment at the state-owned factories also gave them more bargaining power because although the factories could pressure them, their jobs were mostly stable. It was even more challenging for the local government in Shanghai to persuade families that lived in shanty neighborhoods to send their children to the countryside. One government report written in 1969 documented that, in the Yaoshuilong neighborhood in Jiaozhou district in Shanghai, 70 percent of graduated students refused to go to the countryside. Although most lao sanjie eventually were sent to the countryside, it was difficult to know how many went willingly.

Like many Shanghai families who were not enthusiastic about sending their children to the countryside, some cadres in rural villages were also not excited about the arrival of the urban youth. Many village officials first learned about the news from radios and broadcasts. A senior provincial official from Anhui province, who was sent to the villages to oversee the sent-down youth mobilization, wrote that local county and village officials were unprepared for the task of allocating the urban youth and "were afraid to make mistakes." In Heilongjiang Province, local village officials scrambled to transport the sent-down youth from train stations to villages. In some villages in Heilongjiang, it was also challenging for the local officials to find enough housing and sufficient food to settle many urban youth.

Apart from the urban residents and the rural village officials' ambivalent attitudes towards the sent-down youth movement, some local villagers were also unsure how to deal with the urban youth sent to their villages. In the Ganchazi commune in Heilongjiang, eighty-six youth from Shanghai—many who had troubled records and served time in Shanghai's juvenile detention—were sent there. Locals found it challenging to deal with these youth who reportedly fought among themselves, gambled, drank, stole, and killed animals. Local villages in Anhui province that received youth from Shanghai who had criminal records encountered similar issues. The head of the Anhui Provincial Office of Sent-Down Youth reported that the local villagers "hated them, but they were afraid to say anything."

Rustication did not end the Cultural Revolution in the minds of many sent-down youth. Many continued to organize study groups on social issues. Some even organized underground cells in case the opportunity for rebellion appeared again, although these groups were the minority.

Development

From 1962 to 1979, no fewer than 16 million youth were displaced (some sources set the minimum at 18 million). Although many were directed to distant provinces such as Inner Mongolia, the usual destinations for the sent-down youth were rural counties in neighboring areas. Many of the Red Guards from Shanghai travelled no further than the nearby islands of Chongming and Hengsha at the mouth of the Yangtze.

In 1971, numerous problems with the movement began to come to light, at the same time as the Communist Party allocated jobs to the youth who were returning from the country. The majority of these re-urbanized youth had taken advantage of personal relations (guanxi) to leave the countryside. Those involved with the "Project 571" coup denounced the entire movement as being disguised penal labor (laogai). In 1976, even Mao realized the severity of the rustication movement and decided to reexamine the issue. But in the meantime, over a million youth continued to be rusticated every year. Many students could not deal with the harsh life and died in the process of reeducation.

As a response to the return of sent-down youth, state-owned enterprises in the late 1970s and 1980s often started collectively-owned enterprises to create employment opportunities for the family of SOE workers. This approach to providing jobs for returning youths was particularly common in northeast China.

The urban-rural gap

Before the arrival of the urban youth, many local officials were concerned that the students from the cities would add extra burdens, especially financial ones, to them. For instance, a county official in Huma in Heilongjiang wrote a report to the provincial government that the county did not have enough land and other materials to allocate and support the 6000 youth assigned to live there. The county needed additional financial subsidies to settle them.

And when many sent-down youth arrived in the rural regions they were assigned to, they were appalled by the poverty and the poor living conditions in many villages. In the case of the Shanghai sent-down youth, the differences between the rural and frontier regions and Shanghai were even more shocking. The sent-down youth from Shanghai brought with them clothes, bedding, soap, bowls, food, and when they returned home for a visit each year, they brought back with them more goods, some of which were also wanted by local villagers. In some villages in Yunnan, the Shanghai sent-down youth traded goods they bought in Shanghai, such as clothes, soap, candies, with local villagers in exchange for local agricultural produces.

But one of the most significant benefits for having sent-down youths from big cities was that local villages and cadres, through connections they made with the sent-down youth and municipal offices, acquired materials, including tools for agricultural work and even for factories. In one case, officials from Heilongjiang went to the Shanghai Sent-down Youth office in fall 1969. They requested that Shanghai dispatch materials to Heilongjiang to accommodate the sent-down youth from Shanghai there. And Shanghai municipal government not only sent supplies for the Shanghai sent-down youth in Heilongjiang, but they also sent "two buses, thirteen trucks, nine tractors, thirty-six hand-operated tractors, and several cars, with a total value of 1.06 million yuan" to facilitate with the local government's allocation of urban youth.

To help provide more jobs for the sent-down youth in rural regions, the Shanghai municipal government also helped rural places set up factories to allocate the sent-down urban students. For example, local officials in the Jinghong district in Yunnan province proposed to officials in Shanghai that they wanted to build a factory manufacturing wooden products. The factory would provide jobs for the Shanghai sent-down youth there. And the Shanghai government provided equipment, loans, and technicians from Shanghai to Jinghong to help build the factory. Like Shanghai, the Beijing municipal government also provided agricultural and industrial equipment, and large quantities of goods, to rural regions to help settle the sent-down youth.

Many sent-down youths became teachers, ad hoc engineers, or barefoot doctors. Sent-down youth were a major subset of China's rural projectionists during the Cultural Revolution period. Rusticated youths with an interest in broadcast technology frequently operated the rural radio stations after 1968.Sent-down youth did not typically become very productive as agricultural workers.

Although it was impossible to quantify how much urban cities' transfer of goods and equipment and support with building factories helped to drive rural economic growth in the down-to-the countryside movement during the Cultural Revolution, the transfer of goods, money, and technology from urban to rural places—because of the existence of urban sent-down youth in rural regions—nonetheless played a significant role in rural regions' economic development in this time. In the words of scholars Emily Honig and Xiaojian Zhao, the sent-down youth "sometimes unwittingly and sometimes intentionally, created connections that transcended the rural-urban Divide of Maoist China."

Gendered experiences

Female sent-down youth

Not suitable for agricultural work

Living conditions in the villages where the urban youth were sent varied, depending on whether they were sent to frontier regions such as Inner Mongolia or Heilongjiang, rural areas not too far from Shanghai or Beijing, or elsewhere in inland provinces. But regardless of the different locations they were sent to, urban youth found it challenging to perform heavy agricultural work alongside the villagers. For female sent-down youth, working in villages was particularly challenging. Some villagers listed five types of sent-down youth they did not want, and female ones were listed among the five types. One person in a commune in Heilongjiang commented on the lack of physical strength of sent-down youth, particularly females, to perform agricultural work. The person said: "three sent-down youth cannot match the abilities of one local. And two female sent-down youth cannot match the work of one male."

Female sent-down youth lacked physical strength compared to their male counterparts and the villagers performing agricultural work. They also had to deal with illnesses caused by working in unfavorable conditions. According to a report from a county in the northeastern Jilin Province, 70 percent of the female sent-down youth in the county had "female illnesses" after they worked in "wet fields during their menstrual periods." The report blamed the local village officials for requesting the female sent-down youth to do the same work as the male sent-down youth; it also blamed the females themselves for not being aware of their health. Wu Jianping, a female student from Beijing sent to Heilongjiang when she was 16, said that the sent-down students were all very "enthusiastic" working in the fields. Female sent-down youth did not tell others when they menstruated but continued working in the wet fields. As a result, many sent-down youth, said Wu, suffered from arthritis when they grew older. Feng Jifang, a female student from Harbin who was sent to a state-owned farm in Bei'an county in Heilongjiang, also when she was 16, said she did not have enough nutritious food to eat despite the heavy farm work she performed. She would not even menstruate because of a lack of nutrition. Feng said that she had arthritis and developed pains in her spine, ankles, and wrists due to working on the farm as a teenager.

Marriages

The marriage law that took into effect in the 1950s in the PRC made explicit distinctions between men and women. It requested that the minimum age for marriage for men was twenty, and women eighteen. In the 1970s, the government advocated for late marriages and made distinctions between the urban and the rural when setting the minimum age for marriages. For urban residents, the new minimum age for marriages was set at twenty-eight for men and twenty-five for women. For rural residents, the minimum marriage age was twenty-five for men and twenty-three for women. For the female urban youth who went to the villages between 1966 and 1968 and were then categorized as rural residents, they reached the minimum age for late marriages in around 1973. Once one reached the minimum age for marriage, pressures from the society mounted for the youth to get married. Some young female sent-down youth from families with problematic class backgrounds also viewed marrying local peasants as a way to mend their bad class background.

Messages on marriages from the central government concerning the sent-down youth seemed mixed. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the down to the countryside movement was in its prime, propaganda from the news media, to create further momentum for the movement, enthusiastically advocated for the sent-down youth to "put down their roots for the whole life" in the villages, and to get married and settle in the rural regions. But at the same time, the government also campaigned for late marriages. This paradox was reflected in a People's Daily commentary on June 26, 1969. The commentary, titled "A Wild World with Great Potentials" (guangkuo tiandi dayou zuowei 广阔天地大有作为), in one paragraph called for the sent-down youth to settle their roots in the countryside, and in another stressed that it was important for the youth to get married late. Several months later, in March 1970, at a conference held in Beijing about the sent-down youth, attendees again stressed that sent-down youth should get married late.

Propaganda calling for the sent-down youth to marry late became more intense in the early 1970s. On July 9, 1970, an article published on the People's Daily stated that whether the sent-down youth married late mattered greatly to class struggle. According to the article, "the poor and middle peasants are educating the sent-down youth to deal correctly with marriage issues and persuade them to marry late. Late marriage must be understood as part of class struggle. The instances of early marriage reflect class enemies trying to undermine the movement." At a working meeting discussing the sent-down youth held in 1973, attendees—including former model sent-down youths and premier Zhou Enlai, discussed how much money a sent-down youth couple would need to construct a new house and buy furniture for themselves if they get married. Zhou commented at the meeting that the sent-down youth could spend seven to ten years in the countryside until they accumulated more resources, and then with some subsidies, Zhou said, they could get married and build themselves a house.

Scholars Xiaomeng Liu and Michel Bonnin wrote that the government's concerns about controlling the population and housing costs were the main reasons behind its push for late marriages among the sent-down youth. While scholars Emily Honig and Xiaojian Zhao interpreted that, the government's late marriage advocacy aiming for sent-down youth were to maintain the urban-rural divide because one character that marked the urban population's difference from the rural villagers was that the former did not practice early marriages as the latter group did.

A watershed moment in the development of the marriage policy occurred in early 1974, when Bai Qixian, a college graduate from Hebei who married a local peasant wrote letters to several newspapers. Bai's family opposed her decision when she married a peasant in the village where she was sent down. Bai shouldered much of the homework and took care of her parents-in-law. Still, the couple fought, and Bai's husband often beat her. Bai's marriage was mocked by the villagers frequently. Enraged, Bai wrote letters to newspapers at the end of 1973. In the letters, Bai wrote:

"Some people say that marrying a peasant is no good, but in my opinion, the kind of people who covet personal enjoyment and look down on farmers are the most pathetic… Some people say that staying behind in the countryside has no future, while I firmly believe that toiling in the vast countryside for one's whole life is a great accomplishment and has a bright future."

When Bai sent her letters, it was when the Maoist left, led by Jiang Qing, was doubling down on the Campaign to Criticize Lin Biao and Confucius. The sent-down youth, especially those who married local peasants and "put down roots" in the villages, were praised as heroes. With this context, Bai's marriage to the local farmer was set as an example, and state media used her story as propaganda to call for other sent-down youth to follow Bai. On January 27, 1974, Hebei Daily published Bai's letter, praising it as a "model text" to "criticize Lin Biao and Confucius." Not long after, People's Daily published an article about Bai. With Bai gaining fame, other local governments also selected sent-down youths who married local farmers as honorary examples. All the models the local governments set up, whom the newspapers often praised for "breaking up completely with the old tradition," were female sent-down youths.

From 1974 to 1976, the Maoist left vigorously promoted the sent-down youth to marry local farmers. Marrying villagers was praised as "breaking up completely with the old tradition" and supporting the political campaigns against Lin Biao and Deng Xiaoping. In Baoding in Hebei Province, rough statistics from 1978 showed that, among the sent-down youth who were married, 75.5% married local farmers. And in Jilin province, 74.9% of sent-down youth married local farmers in 1980.

Sexual violence

In some rural regions, sent-down youth were sexually abused by local officials and villagers. In June 1973, the National Working Conference on Sent-Down Youth was held in Beijing. Before the meeting, which lasted for six weeks, the State Council sent out working teams to 24 provinces to investigate the living conditions of the sent-down youth. The working teams reported that from 1969 to 1973, there were 23,000 incidents in which sent-down youth were mistreated or abused.

Out of the 23,000 incidents, 70% were about sexual violence committed against female sent-down youth. In the early 1970s, more cases of sexual violence committed against female sent-down youth were reported. In 1972, in Hebei province, out of all the reported claims that the sent-down youth were abused, 94% were about sexual violence committed against female sent-down youth. The percentage number in the same year in Jiangsu and Jilin was about 80%.

At the Inner Mongolia Production and Construction Corps, 11 such cases were reported in 1969; the number of cases rose to 54 in 1970 and 69 in 1972. From 1969 to 1973, 507 cases of sexual violence were reported in Guangxi Province. At the Heilongjiang Production and Construction Corps, 365 sexual violence cases had been reported from 1968 to 1973. In some reported cases, the female sent-down youth became pregnant after being raped. And in some cases—many of which were committed by local cadres of the villages or Production and Construction Corps, the female sent-down youth who were sexually assaulted suffered from physical or mental illnesses, and some died.

It was difficult to know how many female sent-down youth suffered from sexual violence. Many kept silent for fear that they might not return to the cities if they said anything. Some did not make their grievances public because victims of sexual violence were still stigmatized. Some who were from families with "bad" class backgrounds did not dare to report the local cadres who had power to retaliate against them.

Rural male peasants demonized, female peasants ignored

Although it was impossible to calculate how many abuse or sexual violence cases were committed against the sent-down youth, its severity prompted the central government to issue a document, Document 21, in 1972. In December 1972, a schoolteacher from Fujian, Li Qinglin, wrote a letter to Mao. Li complained about how local cadres exercised their power over the sent-down youth and the poor living condition of his son, who was sent to a village. Mao wrote back to Li, promising that he would solve the problems. And to address the issue, Zhou Enlai and other top leaders held a meeting and produced Document 21, which stated that those who undermined the down-to-the-countryside movement and abused their power would receive punishment. Soon, a nationwide campaign swept through the country, and local officials felt pressure to produce reports and punish whoever could be categorized as undermining the movement. It was in this context that sexual relationships between sent-down youth and local villagers were criminalized.

Reports from 1973 suggested that languages used in government reports started to shift this year. Sexual relationships—including consensual ones—between female sent-down youth and local male villagers were increasingly described with the word jian, such as tongjian (extramarital sex), youjian (trick someone into sex), and qiangjian (rape). Before the central government held National Working Conference on Sent-Down Youth in June 1973, Zhou Enlai read reports about two severe cases of sexual violence against female sent-down youth; one committed by local state-owned military farm officials in Yunnan and the other local cadres in Heilongjiang. Enraged, Zhou ordered the Yunnan report sent to all participants of the National Working Conference on Sent-Down youth and required that attendees carry out comprehensive investigations about sexual violence after returning to their provinces. Other leaders at the conference requested that the cadres at the military farms in Yunnan be executed.

By the end of the national conference, on August 4, 1973, Document 30, which specifically forbade rape and forced marriage in the sent-down youth movement, was published. Local governments carried out extensive campaigns following Document 30, targeting not only for rape cases but also other forms of sexual assault. The campaigns were so intense that local officials, under pressure to produce reports, criminalized many sexual relationships, including consensual ones, between sent-down youth and local villagers. When local officials were still not able to draft up enough reports, in some cases they also dug up incidents from the past to criminalize sexual relationships.

In reports that concerned sent-down youth from Shanghai, all reports about sexual relationships that were criminalized had local male farmers as perpetrators and female sent-down youth as victims. In some cases, consensual sexual relationships were criminalized. In a few cases, even local farmers who married female sent-down youth were deemed perpetrators of sexual violence against their wives. Scholars Emily Honig and Xiaojian Zhao also proposed that, in the reports concerning Shanghai's sent-down youth, it was plausible to suspect that local male farmers might have been "scapegoated of the powerful cadres accused of sexual assaults." What was missing in these reports, however, was any mentions of local female farmers or male sent-down youth who might have been involved in sexual violence cases or other sexual relationships that the reports criminalized.

Although sexual abuse committed against the sent-down youth, predominantly female sent-down youth, was severe and widespread. The criminalization also included other sexual relationships between sent-down youth and local villagers, including consensual ones and even marriages. The reports concerning Shanghai's sent-down youth showed the unbridgeable gap between the urban and the rural, and they are deeply gendered. Rural male peasants were demonized and portrayed as sexual predators, and victims were all urban female sent-down youth. Male sent-down youth who had sexual relationships with other women, including other sent-down youth and local female villagers, was not criminalized. And rural female peasants who might have suffered sexual violence or engaged in sexual relationships with sent-down youth were thoroughly excluded from the reports.

Rehabilitation

Returned sent-down youth were among the personnel recruited for the Third Front Construction.

After Mao's death in 1976, many of the rusticated youth remained in the countryside. Some of them had married into their villages. In 1977, university entrance exams were reinstated, inspiring the majority of rusticated youth to attempt to return to the cities. In Yunnan in the winter of 1978, the youth used strikes and petitions to implore the government to hear their plight, which reinforced the pressing nature of the issue to party authorities.

In 1978 and 1979, approximately 6.5 million sent down youths returned to urban areas, creating employment pressures. Deng and other reformist policy-makers advocated legalization of small-scale private businesses and overcame objections from conservative policy-makers by appealing to the measure's low-cost job creation benefits for returning sent-down youth.

On March 8, 1980, Hu Yaobang, General Secretary of the Secretariat of the Communist Party, proposed ending rustication. On October 1 of the same year, the party essentially decided to end the movement and allow the youth to return to their families in the cities. In addition, under age and marriage restrictions, one child per family of the rusticated youth was permitted to accompany their parents to their native cities.

In the late 1970s, the scar literature included many vivid and realistic descriptions of their experiences, becoming the first public exploration of the cost of the Cultural Revolution. A different kind of rustication literature, more nuanced in its evaluation of the experience, was inaugurated in the 1980s by the Shanghai writer, and former zhiqing, Chen Cun.

See also

• Scar literature
• Social structure of China

Further reading

• Bernstein, Thomas P. (1977). Up to the Mountains and Down to the Villages: The Transfer of Youth from Urban to Rural China. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
• Rene, Helena K. (2013). "China's Sent-Down Generation: Public Administration and the Legacies of Mao's Rustication Program". Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. ISBN 9781589019874
• Yihong Pan. (2003). Tempered in the Revolutionary Furnace: China’s Youth in the Rustication Movement. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.