Down to the Countryside Movement
상산하향 운동
The policy, following Mao Zedong’s December 1968 instruction that “educated youth must go to the countryside to be re-educated by the poor and lower-middle peasants”, of sending urban secondary-school graduates to villages and frontier production-construction corps. Unlike the small-scale transfers of the 1950s, it moved about seventeen million people between 1968 and 1980, ending the Red Guard movement and absorbing urban unemployment. It was effectively abolished after the 1978 strikes of youths in the Yunnan corps, and the experience of the “zhiqing” generation underlay scar literature and the political consciousness of the reform era.
In depth
The immediate occasion was the end of the Red Guard factional struggle in 1968. With schools closed for more than two years the graduating classes of 1966–1968, the “three old classes”, had piled up, and the cities had no jobs for them. The ideological justification of “re-education” in the countryside combined with relief of urban population pressure.
Most sent-down youths were “inserted” into village production teams to work alongside peasants or posted to the corps in Heilongjiang, Yunnan, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia. Urban youths earned fewer work points than peasants and struggled to live; sexual abuse by cadres and return to the city through the “back door” were widespread, and a parent’s political standing decided who went home.
In 1978 some fifty thousand youths in the Xishuangbanna corps in Yunnan struck and went on hunger strike demanding to return, and in 1979 the State Council allowed mass return. Reform-era leaders such as Xi Jinping came from this generation, whose memories divide between “no regrets for our youth” and a “lost generation”.