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Sent-down youth
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.
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 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.
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."
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Sent-down youth
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.
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 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.
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."