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Mao's Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside Movement was not the first time that Chinese youth were sent into the countryside. Ironically, Mao's primary target, Liu Shaoqi, in the early 1960s implementing the first sending-down policy. This effort was motivated by excess urban population resulting from the Great Chinese Famine that had been caused by Mao's Great Leap Forward. Starving peasants had crowed into the cities in a desperate search for food and it was affecting agricultural production. Stunded by the chaos he set in motuon, Mao was forced to move against the Red Guards he created and were creating chaos throughout China, including the cities. At the same time, Mao persisted in his desire to root out the 'bourgeois thinking' that he saw infecting the Revolution. He thus was insistent on getting who he saw as 'privileged urban youth' from the major cities to the most remote and backward mountainous areas or farming villages to 'learn from the peasants'. He first dissolved the Red Guard and then began sending the young people to out to the countryside. It is believed that some 17 million youth were sent from the cities to the countyide, often extremely remote areas. [Ebery, p. 294.] Most were still teenagers who had just graduated from high school. Mao labeled them 'zhiqing' (Educated Youth). The 'Sent-down' or 'Rusticated Youth' were ordered out of the cities and esentially exiled to most remote areas of China. There is considerable literature on the experiences of these intially, idealistic young people. The authors who described their experiences include Nobel Laureate Liu Xiaobo, Jiang Rong, and Zhang Chengzhi. They were sent to Inner Mongolia in the far northwest. Several of these books have been translated and published in the West. [Sijie] Most commentators consider these people, many of whom lost the opportunity to attend university, China's 'lost generation'. This was one of the longest of Mao' many campaigns. and it produced what some Chinese historians have called -- 'the lost generation'. Mao insisted that that urban students were being given the oportunity to 'develop their talents to the full' by being exposed to the rural peasantry. [Dietrich, p. 199.] Laboring in the remote countrysideduring much of the 1970s, these young people received little or no schooling and were actually denied the right to pursue advanced education. They lost their opportunities to enter university. Nor did they acquire any marketable skills for their furture.
Dietrich, Craig. People's China: A Brief History 3rd ed. (Oxford University Press, 1997).
Ebrey, Patricia Buckley. China: A Cultural, Social, and Political History 1st ed. (Wadsworth Publishing: 2005).
Sijie, Dai. Dai Sijie's Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress isone of the most celebrated of the books written by those Nao sent into the countryside. vernment Printing Office: Jan. 11 1954).
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