Sent-down youth
[1][2] The vast majority of young people who went to the rural communities had received primary to secondary school education, and only a small minority had matriculated to the post-secondary or university level.
[3] 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.
[8] The system mandated peasants to sell "surplus" grain to the state at a fixed low price while providing city residents with guaranteed rations, which widened existing gaps between urban and rural China.
Initially designed as a surveillance tool for the 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 an urban/non-agricultural registration according to one's residence.
While city residents/individuals with an urban or non-agricultural hukou were entitled to guaranteed food rations, housing, health care and education, rural or agricultural households were bound by strict control over physical mobility.
At the end of each year, agricultural producers' cooperatives paid their members with some proportion of the harvest and cash from grain sell to the state, according to one's work points, age, and sex.
[12] The large-scale agricultural collectivization in the PRC's countryside in the 1950s created a high demand for educated individuals that (at least) had received basic trainings in mathematics to serve as collective accountants and work point recorders.
"[13] Mao's comment later became a famous slogan to promote the mass resettlement campaign during the Cultural Revolution, when tens of millions of educated youths, regardless of their household registration or residences, went to the countryside voluntarily or under coercion.
Since the very beginning of the Up to Mountains and Down to the Countryside Movement, those came from rural areas, although received much less public attentions as compared to their urban counterparts at the time and even in nowadays, have always been the majority of educated youths affected.
[citation needed] Redirecting rural youths to go back to their place of origins relieved but never resolved the gathering of elementary and middle school graduates that could neither go on to higher education nor acquire working opportunities in cities.
In a meeting held 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.
In other words, Zhou pointed out that the educated youth resettlement campaign must be cooperated with strictly enforced birth control measures in cities and the two-tiered household registration system.
Such an allowance was aimed to cover educated youths' resettlement expenses, including costs of transportation, home building, food, farming tools, and furniture, in the transitional period between their departure places and their first "paycheck" received after their arrivals (usually at the end of each year).
[30] In other words, the conceptual and perceived gaps between workers and peasants, urban and rural areas, and manual and mental labors (later known collectively as the "Three Difference" or 三大差別; sān dà chābié) persisted and had impacts on peoples' decisions or reactions to the PRC policies.
As a result, one of the primary propaganda slogans that the CCP's central leadership adopted to promote the Up to Mountains and Down to the Countryside Movement during the Cultural Revolution was to eliminate the "Three Differences."
Envisioning a nationwide revolution, the party's central leadership announced in September that the state would provide all revolutionary students and faculties a free ride to Beijing and living subsidies en route.
Some indeed responded to the party's central 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).
Several female urban educated youths that resettled at production teams in Inner Mongolia reported in 1965 that they had been prohibited from getting in touch with local "poor and lower-middle class peasants" (pin-xia-zhong nong 貧下中農) due to their "bad" family background.
For instance, a production brigade in the Zengcheng county, Guangdong province prohibited all urban educated youths and "bad elements" (huai fenzi 壞分子) of the "five black categories" from participating in the mass gatherings.
[39] In the face of harsh living and working conditions, as well as threats to personal safety, these Shanghai sent-down youths caught the opportunity of the "great networking" (da chuanlian 大串連) and returned home.
[40] Most cadres at the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corp turned to support the "great networking" in late 1966, after some attempts to prevent urban educated youths from returning to cities by setting up checkpoints on main roads failed.
Instead, returned sent-down youths tactfully attributed the movement to Liu Shaoqi, who had been labelled a "traitor" and also a "capitalist roader" and was 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 Mountains and Down to the Countryside Movement in Hebei, Henan, Hubei, Hunan and Shandong provinces.
[45] It should be pointed out that Liu Shaoqi's interpretations of the Up to Mountains and Down to the Countryside Movement in 1957 were consistent with the party's central leadership's design—to resolve urban unemployment and admissions problems and accelerate rural development concurrently.
Returned urban educated youths and their parents gathered in cities that included Guangzhou, Changsha, Wuhan and Shanghai and protested about Liu Shaoqi and his "black talons and teeth's" (hei zhaoya 黑爪牙) abuses.
[95] 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
