Sent-down, rusticated, or educated youth (), 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. "The Zhiqing and the Rustication Movement "Zhiqing" is the abbreviation for zhishi qingnian, which is usually translated as "educated youth". (Zhishi means "knowledge" while qingnian means "youth".) The term zhishi qingnian appeared during "China's Sent-Down Generation 2013 216 "zhiqing: Contraction of zhishi qingnian, ..." 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.The A to Z of the Chinese Cultural Revolution -Guo Jian, Yongyi Song, Yuan Zhou – 2009 p74 "EDUCATED YOUTHS (zhishi qingnian or zhiqing). Although college graduates were also included in its original definition, this term, as commonly understood today, refers mainly to urban and suburban middle-school and high-school graduates during the Cultural Revolution who went to the... to be reeducated by the farmers there"
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.Liu Xiaomeng 劉小萌, Zhongguo Zhiqing Shi: Dachao (1966–1980 Nian) 中國知青史：大潮 (1966–1980年) [History of Chinese Educated Youths: High Tide (1966–1980)] (Beijing: Zhongguo Shehui Kexue Chubanshe [China Social Sciences Press], 1998), 1Ding Yizhuang 定宜莊,Zhongguo Zhiqing Shi: Chulan (1953–1968 Nian) 中國知青史：初瀾 [History of Chinese Educated Youths: Prelude (1953–1968)] (Beijing: Zhongguo Shehui Kexue Chubanshe, 1998) 2. 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.Liu, Zhongguo Zhiqing Shi, 1. 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.Liu, Zhongguo Zhiqing Shi, 2.
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 . 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!"Wei Wei 魏巍, "Chuangzao Xingfu de Jiaxiang 創造幸福的家鄉 [Create Happy Hometown]," Zhongguo Qingnian 中國青年 [Chinese Youth] 22 (1955).
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 "" (; 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.Brown, City versus Countryside in Mao's China, 3–4. 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 (). 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.Liu, Zhongguo Zhiqing Shi, 4.
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 (), 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 () 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.Stevan Harrell, An Ecological History of Modern China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2023), 110. 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."Liu, Zhongguo Zhiqing Shi, 7.
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.Ding, Zhongguo Zhiqing Shi, 44. Inspired by the Soviet Virgin Lands Campaign, the Communist Youth League of China (CYLC) organized model youth volunteer pioneer teams () in 1955 to establish the Chinese version of Komsomolsk in remote, mountainous regions and borderlands.Liu, Zhongguo Zhiqing Shi, 8. 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.Ding, Zhongguo Zhiqing Shi, 46–49, 52–54. In 1956, about 210,000 youths participated in the Chinese Virgin Lands Campaign.Ding, Zhongguo Zhiqing Shi, 53. 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.Ding, Zhongguo Zhiqing Shi, 53–54.
Another underrepresented subgroup of educated youths was the border-support youth (): male and female party cadres, young peasants, workers, technicians, veterans, and educated youths, primarily from rural areas.Ding, Zhongguo Zhiqing Shi, 152. 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", ). Rural educated youths were 18.6 percent of all border-support youth who arrived at Xinjiang in 1961, and 17.5 percent in 1962.Ding, Zhongguo Zhiqing Shi, 153. 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.Ding, Zhongguo Zhiqing Shi, 54. In 1959 and 1960, the national treasury appropriated over 200 million yuan for the resettlement of border-support youth.Ding, Zhongguo Zhiqing Shi, 149.
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.Liu, Zhongguo Zhiqing Shi, 18. Since settling in cities when possible has been the most-desired option (providing a promising future), tens of millions of youths movedor returnedto cities.Ding, Zhongguo Zhiqing Shi, 147.