CCP’s Revamped ‘Down to the Countryside’ Movement Doomed to Failure: Experts

Young people attending a job fair in Beijing on Aug. 26, 2022. China's slowing economy has left millions of young people fiercely competing for an ever-slimming raft of jobs and facing an increasingly uncertain future. Jade Gao/AFP via Getty Images

News Analysis

Chinese state media has recently published numerous articles encouraging urban youth to “revitalize the countryside.” China experts believe that the Cultural Revolution has returned, although in a form that may not be immediately recognizable.

Amid China’s struggling economy and high unemployment, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is attempting to allure young people to rural areas with attractive—although deceptive—narratives. However, the CCP today no longer has the ability to force urban youths to go to the countryside, as it did back in the 1960s.

‘A Rainbow Village’

An article in state media China Youth Daily on April 4 claimed that a 26-year-old college graduate named Zhang Guifang became famous overnight when a video showing her unusual career path went viral on Chinese social media.

The video, titled “What’s it like for a college graduate to be a village cadre,” featured Zhang, who was born in 1997, returning to her home village and becoming a rural cadre—a civil servant holding a managerial position in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Her daily work mainly involves handling miscellaneous tasks for elderly and nearly illiterate villagers; for example, helping to make sure that an elderly villager’s pension has been deposited into his bank account. She has also initiated some basic “infrastructure” work, such as renovating the water pipe network, adding small entertainment facilities, and inviting a painter to paint a “rainbow wall” for the village.

According to the article, Zhang had difficulty adapting to her job as a village “chief” in the first few months, but now finds the work “increasingly interesting” and shares her experiences with peers who want to join the “rural revitalization cause.”

Zhang’s story has been prominently featured in Chinese news media, which praised her for “creating a rainbow” in the countryside. “University Graduate Returns to Revitalize Village” gushed a headline on state media China Daily.

Another China Youth Daily article, published March 31, tells the story of a group of college graduates who helped villagers open up sales channels for peaches. The local area boasted an abundance of peaches, but they were not profitable due to a lack of organization and marketing. The young people’s efforts brought in 1.46 million yuan (about $200,000) in peach sales.

This story and others speak approvingly of young people returning to rural areas to “take root at the grassroots level,” employing modern technology to assist local peasants.

The message is clear: the authorities wish to see more college graduates starting careers in the countryside.

‘The Cultural Revolution Has Returned’

Chen Pokong, a political commentator living in the United States, recently stated on his self-media program that “the Cultural Revolution has returned, [although] in a manner that is not easily recognizable.” He feels that the CCP is using manipulative language and various deceitful methods to give young people a sense of hope.

Chen speculates that the CCP will avoid using old terms like “up to the mountains and down to the countryside” when attempting to inspire and motivate young people to go work in rural areas, instead using terms such as “high-quality farmers,” “rural revitalization,” and “high-quality development.” In reality, he says, it is just the same old path, and one that has proved to lead to a dead end.

According to Chen Weijian, editor-in-chief of “Beijing Spring,” a monthly pro-democracy magazine, the emergence of such articles is due to serious economic problems and a massive scale of unemployment, especially soaring youth unemployment.

“Economic factors will lead to social unrest,” Chen said in an interview with The Epoch Times on April 5.

“Young people who can’t find jobs spend their days idling at home. With no financial means and no prospects for their future, they often rely on their parents for support. The CCP sees them as ‘unstable factors’ which may cause social unrest and even criminal activities, but the authorities have no solution. Therefore, they are now heavily promoting the idea of sending these young people to the countryside,” he said.

The CCP’s official figures claim that China’s urban youth unemployment rate among 16-24 year-olds reached nearly 20 percent in July 2022. However, outside experts believe that the CCP’s statistics do not include rural areas. At the same time, in 2022, China’s college graduate population exceeded 10 million for the first time, indicating that the real unemployment rate among young people may be even higher.

Some young people in China are choosing to “lie low,” opting for jobs with lower income but less stress. Others try to land jobs as public servants. However, over the past three years, the CCP’s extreme “zero-COVID policy” has depleted local finances, leaving local governments heavily in debt and making it difficult for young people to find jobs in the public sector.

Today’s Situation is Different

Chen Weijian said that the current movement being promoted by the CCP is very different from the “Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside Movement” during the Cultural Revolution.

Red Guards— high school and university students—brandish copies of Chairman Mao's “Little Red Book” in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution. The Red Guards rampaged through the country, terrorizing people deemed "class enemies,"  particularly the elderly. Jean Vincent/AFP via Getty Images

Chen described the household registration system of Mao Zedong’s era. At that time, under the rationing system, everyone needed vouchers to purchase daily essentials. If anyone refused to respond to the CCP’s call to go to the countryside, their household registration would be canceled. Without household registration or food vouchers, survival was impossible. However, the situation is different now.

“In the past, rural areas were in the form of ‘people’s communes,’ and everything was under the leadership of the commune, which belonged to the government. Therefore, it was easy for the authorities to impose controls,” Chen said.

“At that time, it was arranged that young people who went to the countryside would stay with peasants, and the government provided food for these young people. This was a government arrangement, and peasants could only accept it. But now things are different. Land has been distributed to households, to individual peasants. If the government requires rural villagers to provide food for these young people who are sent to the countryside, it will be extremely difficult to implement.”

“Undoubtedly, the CCP will take compulsory measures, but the complexity and difficulty of doing so are unimaginable,” Chen said. “Forcing young people from the cities to stay with peasants is something I don’t believe the CCP has the ability to do.”

The Cultural Revolution’s ‘Red Guards’

In December 1968, two years into the Cultural Revolution, the CCP launched the “Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside Movement.” In a mere two years, the Cultural Revolution had devastated Chinese society, with political turmoil disrupting daily life and the country’s economy plunging into deep crisis.

When CCP Chairman Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution in 1966, his goal was to mobilize the Red Guards—the youth of China—to quell what he perceived as pro-capitalist or pro-bourgeois elements in China and in the CCP.  Mao had lost trust in CCP officials and members. His decision to launch the Cultural Revolution is now widely seen as an attempt to destroy his enemies by urging the people to purify the ranks of the communist party.

The Red Guards were given a great deal of license; gangs of students attacked people wearing “bourgeois” clothes, and intellectuals and party officials were murdered or driven to commit suicide.  Schools throughout China were closed for two years and even private homes were ransacked in the assault on “feudal traditions.”

By the summer of 1968, Mao’s objectives had been achieved, but the “red terror” was out of control and society was on the verge of total collapse—universities were still not admitting students and factories were still not hiring workers.

More than 4 million urban graduates from the three-year period between 1966 and 1968 had been left stranded without employment or further education, creating a pressing social issue that demanded an immediate solution.

‘Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside’

Mao urgently wanted to remove these overly radical students from the cities, seeing them as elements of social unrest. The Red Guards had been given an enormous amount of power during the Cultural Revolution and did not want to give it up. Mao rightly saw them as a threat.

On Dec. 22, 1968, Mao issued an order through the CCP’s mouthpiece newspaper, the People’s Daily, stating that it was “very necessary for educated youth to go to the countryside and receive reeducation from poor and lower-middle peasants.” This directive formally marked the beginning of the nationwide “Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside Movement.”

The total number of educated youth who participated in the movement during the Cultural Revolution reached over 16 million: ultimately one-tenth of the urban population was sent to the countryside.

By forcibly sending millions of urban youths to the countryside for labor, Mao achieved his goal of dissolving the Red Guard organization. However, for many of the urban young people, it was the darkest experience of their lives. The best years of the “lost generation” were squandered and countless families were forcibly separated, causing unimaginable human tragedy.