Educated Youth Going to Work in the Countryside and Mountainous Areas

In order to solve the problem of urban youth employment and change the backward situation in rural areas, the state has mobilized urban junior and senior high school graduates to settle down in rural areas and far border areas, thus forming a large-scale movement of young intellectuals to go up to the mountains and down to the villages. In 1955, the Central Committee of the Communist Youth League organized the expedition of intellectuals to reclaim wasteland in more than ten provinces and municipalities, such as Beijing, Tianjin and Shanghai, which was the prelude for urban educated youth to go to the mountains and down to the villages.

In 1962, with the national economy was restructured and a policy of urban population reduction was implemented on a large scale, then the planned migration of the intellectual youth intellectuals to go up to the mountains and down to the villages began. From 1962 to 1966, about 1.29 million urban and rural intellectuals settled down in rural areas. After the “Cultural Revolution” was launched, here was a massive backlog of high school graduates due to the industrial standstill and the suspension of university admissions, and in 1968, there was more than 4 million graduates backlogged for three years. In the face of serious social employment problems, Mao Zedong issued a call in December 1968: "It is necessary for young intellectuals to go up to the mountains and down to the villages and receive re-education from the poor and lower-middle peasants." With the vigorous movement of young intellectuals going up to the mountains and down to the villages all over the country, the unemployed urban junior and senior high school graduates, except for special circumstances, almost all of them settled in rural areas, inland farms or frontier production and construction corps, which was a measure then became a national policy and system during the “Cultural Revolution”.

From 1967 to 1976, a total of 16.4 million educated youth from cities and towns went to the mountainous areas and the countryside. In October 1978, the “National Work Conference on the Up to the Mountains and Down to the Villages” made several adjustments in the policy of urban educated going up to the mountains and down to the villages.

After the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh CPC Central Committee, the nationwide movement of going up to the mountains and down to the villages by urban educated youth was finally over, and the vast majority of young intellectuals returned to the cities. The vast majority of young intellectuals went to the mountainous areas, villages and border areas to understand the society, contact workers and peasants in difficult environments, they underwent training, increased their talents, made great contributions to the construction of rural areas and the development and revitalization of underdeveloped areas of the motherland, and some of them grew up to be the backbone of leadership and economy on all fronts. However, a large number of urban educated youth lost the opportunity to receive formal education in schools, causing a gap in the growth of talents and bringing great difficulties to the modernization of the country. The state, enterprises and institutions spent more than 30 billion yuan for the resettlement of urban youth returning from the mountainous areas and villages. The material losses of parents of educated youth and the losses of farmer families in the relevant regions was an additional burden to be taken into account.