A young farmer walks on a mountain village path in Songyang County, Zhejiang Province, China, Nov. 13, 2019. (WANG ZHAO/AFP via Getty Images)
China’s economy was hit hard during the Communist Party’s pneumonia (COVID-19) pandemic, with a large number of businesses closing and unemployment soaring. To ease the pressure on the cities, the Communist Party authorities are calling on young people to “start their own businesses” in the countryside. A university student in Tianjin “answered the call” only to find that none of the official promises made beforehand had been fulfilled.
According to the latest real-Time statistics released by the WHO, as of 10:17 a.m. CET on March 8, the cumulative number of confirmed cases of pneumonia in the world had reached 116,363,935, with 2,587,225 cumulative deaths. Although the Epidemic has recently shown signs of easing, the economies of many countries have been hit in varying degrees by the impact of the epidemic.
China’s economy has been hit hard by the Communist Party’s prolonged and extremely harsh blockade policy in response to the epidemic, which has resulted in the closure of a large number of businesses across the country and has left a large number of people in dire straits due to unemployment. To prevent massive unemployment from causing social unrest, Beijing authorities have recently stepped up propaganda to encourage urban, highly educated youth to “start their own businesses” in rural areas, allegedly launching a new version of the “Go to the mountains and go to the countryside” campaign.
The General Office of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and the General Office of the State Council issued “Opinions on Accelerating the Revitalization of Rural Talents” on Feb. 23, giving another boost to the movement of intellectual youths to the countryside, the Voice of America reported Tuesday (9). As early as more than a year ago, the Communist Party’s major official media and prominent scholars had already started to build momentum for the restart of the “Go to the Mountains and Go to the Countryside” campaign.
The report revealed that a famous university graduate in Tianjin, surnamed He, listened to the official propaganda and gave up the state-owned enterprise job his Parents arranged for him in Tianjin to “answer the call” to “train himself” in the countryside, thinking he could “make a big difference. He thought he could “make a big difference”. However, when Mr. He “settled” in the countryside as he had hoped, he found that the township government did not give him the reappointment he deserved, as officially promised.
Mr. He disclosed that after a group of highly educated young people like him went to the countryside, the township government did not place them in the jobs that the government initially used to attract them, but rather, like ordinary employees, they were placed in various government departments to complete some simple tasks. Officials’ prior promises of government subsidies and good supporting conditions were also not fulfilled.
He said, “Our salary and treatment is not very high, it may be a cut below even ordinary civil servants, there is no talk of some special subsidies for our positions, no, we are now treated in such a way that we can barely maintain our normal Life.”
The report pointed out that during the stage when the Chinese Communist Party officially promoted college students to work as village officials in the countryside, the officials had some promises to the college students, such as solving the household registration, giving priority to graduate students and giving special subsidies. Many university graduates took “going to the countryside” as a springboard and participated in the “talent to the countryside program” promoted by the government. However, in reality, the relevant policies are not available, the subsidies cannot keep up, and the implementation capacity is poor, so most of these highly educated young people have to leave after going to the countryside and finding that things are not as they wish.
In fact, Mao Zedong, the former leader of the Chinese Communist Party, was the originator of the “Go to the mountains and go to the countryside” movement for intellectual youth. In the 1960s and 1970s, the frenzied Cultural Revolution brought China’s economy to the brink of collapse and left a large number of young intellectuals without employment in the cities. In order to prevent the intellectual youth, who were still “revolutionary and active”, from causing trouble in the cities, Mao Zedong launched the “Go to the mountains and go to the countryside” campaign, and through powerful political propaganda, he fooled tens of millions of urban intellectual youth into going to the poor countryside. The “support” for the countryside and the frontier became a lingering nightmare for that generation.
In an interview with Voice of America, Song Yongyi, a professor at California State University, Los Angeles, and a scholar of Chinese Communist Party history, said bluntly that intellectual youths and intellectuals would be more independent-minded, and neither Mao Zedong nor Xi Jinping wanted these young people to be independent-minded. In order to “control the brains of the people”, they set up a campaign to send them to the countryside and “peasantize” them.
Independent scholar Wu Jolai also told Radio Free Asia that the policy goals of the old and new Communist Party’s “go to the countryside” campaigns are the same: to “send these people to remote areas to relieve the pressure on the Communist Party.
Recent Comments