A 1971 photo released in China shows Red Guards in middle school responding to Mao Zedong’s call for intellectual youth to go to the countryside.
The “Go to the Mountains and Go to the Countryside” movement began in the 1950s, developed in the mid-1960s, and ended in the late 1970s, when tens of millions of urban intellectual youths were sent to “support” the countryside and the frontier under the call and organization of the Chinese Communist Party. The “Go to the mountains and go to the countryside” movement, with no return date and no Education, became a nightmare for that generation.
In the fall of 2020, seven ministries and commissions of the Communist Party of China (CPC) simultaneously issued an encouragement for college graduates to go to urban and rural communities for employment and entrepreneurship. On February 23, 2021, the General Office of the CPC Central Committee and the General Office of the State Council also issued the “Opinions on Accelerating the Revitalization of Rural Talents”.
At the same Time, major official media and renowned scholars have also been making efforts to revive the “Go to the mountains and go to the countryside” campaign. In an article published on December 22, 2020, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences’ Chinese Academy of History said that the “Go to the Mountains and Go to the Countryside” movement was “a feat of social progress”. Yu Hongjun, a professor at Peking University, also issued an article calling on the government to restart the “Go to the mountains and go to the countryside” campaign. Xiong Bingqi, an education scholar from mainland China and vice president of the 21st Century Education Research Institute, pointed out that fresh graduates going to urban and rural communities to start their own businesses is, in other words, to work at the grassroots level.
The modern version of going to the countryside is the opposite of going to the countryside
Since the middle of 2019, the Communist Youth League of China has issued the Opinions on Deepening Rural Revitalization, Youth Building Action, which plans to mobilize tens of millions of college and university students to go to the countryside and participate in rural development and construction by 2022.
After graduating from college, Mr. He’s Parents arranged a stable state enterprise job for him in his hometown in Tianjin, but he resigned and decided to join the talent to the countryside program to exercise himself in the countryside because he was young and discontented with the comfortable work in the state enterprise.
He said: “I studied economics in college, when the Family (help), in the city has a relatively stable job. I, because I am young and aggressive, always feel that I can not play out their abilities, because (work) is too comfortable. So I quit my job, just in time for an examination in Tianjin to recruit highly educated people to go to the countryside to realize and complete some national policies, such as rural revitalization. At that time, I thought that while I was young and energetic, I could make a big difference in the rural area.”
Mr. He, who had settled in the countryside as he wished, did not expect that he would not get the reuse he deserved after entering the township through the screening process, which made him not only a little disappointed.
He said: “For a long time after I took office, and it was our group, the situation at the time was that we did not get the attention we deserved. After all, we were highly educated compared to other (village) government employees in general. After we were recruited from above, we were not assigned to the same post we were in when we first took the exam, but were put into various departments like ordinary workers to complete simple tasks.”
Two movements with different paths
The “Go to the mountains and go to the countryside” in Mao’s time was theoretically designed to narrow the “three major differences” between workers and peasants, between urban and rural areas, and between physical and mental labor. But in reality, the purpose of “going to the mountains and going to the countryside” was not only to solve the serious economic problems brought about by the Cultural Revolution, but also to drive the intellectual youth, whose “revolutionary enthusiasm has not yet diminished and whose ideas are still active,” out of the cities in order to consolidate power.
Song Yongyi, a professor at California State University, Los Angeles, and a scholar of Chinese Communist Party history and the Cultural Revolution, told the Voice of America that whether the “Go to the mountains and go to the countryside” was Mao’s or Xi’s, the common denominator was the peasantization of intellectuals or intellectual youth by driving them to the countryside.
He said: “intellectual youth or intellectuals, independent thinking is a little more, because they have knowledge, have the advantage of knowledge. Then whether it is Mao Zedong or Xi Jinping, he does not want these people to have an independent mind, they are sent to the countryside, that is the peasantization. The peasantization of intellectuals is a regression as far as civilization is concerned, and a strengthening as far as his rule is concerned, because he has to control the people’s brains to do so.”
According to Song Yongyi, Xi used economic issues to lobby for the restart of the farce of “going to the countryside”, saying, “Marx had a saying that when those events in history first appear, they are often a drama, but when they appear for the second time, they are a farce or a comedy. A comedy. You can see now that Xi Jinping is constantly engaging in farce and comedy. The reason is that when Mao Zedong did it, it was tens of millions of people going to the countryside, and he was still saying that it was to re-educate the poor peasants. This has been bankrupt, we all know that Mao Zedong then nonsense well. It was the last to be cancelled, and now Xi Jinping wants to do this.”
Song Yongyi added: “Mao Zedong’s era, he also had economic problems, the reason why he drove so many intellectual youth, Red Guards to the countryside, in addition to his bad control, there are economic problems, a large number of people in the city can not be employed, because the Cultural Revolution has made a mess of the economy. The economy now is not as bad as the Cultural Revolution, right? That shows that Xi Jinping has put the control of people’s minds, especially he has put the peasantization of intellectuals and intellectual youth at the top of his list.”
According to Free Asia, independent scholar Wu Jolai argues that both the old and new policies of “going to the countryside” have the same purpose, “to send these people to remote areas and relieve the pressure on the CCP.”
What about the promised subsidies and future?
In addition to feeling that he had “no use for his martial arts skills,” Mr. He also knew in advance that there would be more or less subsidies and good supporting conditions for participating in the Talent to the Countryside Program, and that it would even help him in his future career.
But the reality is quite different from Mr. He’s wish, he said, “Our salary and treatment are not very high, probably a cut below even the ordinary civil servants, there is no saying that because there are some special subsidies for our positions, no, our current treatment can only barely maintain our normal Life.”
China’s rural revitalization program was actually launched several years ago, but most of it is still based on public assistance and support. But the continuous brain drain has made the authorities realize that improving affordable policies such as real subsidies is the key to keeping talents rooted in rural areas.
Liu Yonghao, a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, has proposed that “through subsidies and the construction of supporting conditions, the implementation of the ‘agricultural talents to the countryside’ plan to attract and retain talents.”
According to statistics, 90% of college student village officials face the problem of re-selection and post-management placement after the expiration of their posting period. College student village officials received some government promises during the promotion stage, such as solving household registration and giving priority to graduate school.
Many freshmen who decide to participate in the talent to the countryside program choose to “go to the mountains to the countryside” as a springboard, however, the policy can not come down, subsidies can not keep up, poor implementation capacity, talent to the countryside found that things are not what they want to choose to leave is no excuse.
Mr. He said: “When I first started this work, when we went to the countryside, we were not recognized by the people, because they thought we were Gold-plated, because in their eyes, we are high-tech, highly educated people will not stay in the countryside for a long time, they think we will be transferred or promoted by the government after a year or two here, they are not willing to say something sincere to us. They are not willing to say something sincere to us and let us go into their lives, so that causes some difficulties in our work.”
Village officials are not easy to be farmers want money, not people
When Mr. He officially began to contact the village construction point by point, he realized a more serious problem, unable to communicate with the old villagers. The gap in education and cultural environment led to serious ideological differences between village officials and villagers, two groups of people from different worlds.
He said the peasants have a deep-rooted feudal mindset and are unwilling to change their lives through the advanced technology and ideas brought by urban talent, preferring to wait for government relief to subsidize them.
He said, “There is an old saying in China that ‘it is better to teach a fish than to teach a fish’. I want to use some of the knowledge I learned in college to help build the countryside, to help farmers get out of poverty, and to teach them how to use the new age, high-tech methods to get out of poverty and get rich, and I think that is why the country initiated the policy I think this is the reason why the country launched the policy call. But most of the peasants have the fixed idea of waiting for government subsidies and relief to solve their temporary poverty, but in fact it does not solve their poverty in essence.”
The old and new “going to the mountains to the countryside” face different dilemmas
The historian Ge Jianxiong said that the “going to the mountains and going to the countryside” in mainland China in the last century was not called “youth without regret”, but “youth without choice”. I have to admit that the new generation of youths do have the right to choose, but they need to face the problems of the new era.
Ms. Zhang was one of the 20 million people who went to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, and the years she spent in Shanxi as a team member are etched in her mind. She said that the difficulties faced by talents going to the countryside now are different from those back then. During the Cultural Revolution, the youths had to face the problem of survival, but now they have to deal with the hearts and minds.
She said, “We really went to the lowest level of the rural areas in mainland China and received education on the simplest feelings of the peasants and the most difficult living and production conditions, so we learned how difficult it is for the peasants and how hard Food is. During these years in the countryside, I have made myself aware of the basic living conditions of the vast number of rural (farmers) in China to survive, and their economic conditions, human relations, and their simple and kind true feelings of goodness and beauty.”
Ms. Zhang said that the reason for this feeling is because of the simplicity of the intellectuals and the simplicity of the old countryside back then. But over the decades, mainland China has gone through the Cultural Revolution, reform and opening up, hearts and minds have changed so much, and changes in the economic conditions and cultural knowledge of the country’s people and the environment in which they grew up have made the national quality of the entire society decline.
According to a report by Free Asia, independent scholar Wu Jolai believes that the policy of the old and new “going to the countryside” has the same purpose, “to send these people to remote areas to relieve the pressure of the Chinese Communist Party.”
The sentiments of the old youth
During the Cultural Revolution, the youths were forced to undergo “re-education of the poor peasants”. The most painful thing was the separation of their homes and flesh from their bones.
Ms. Zhang recalls, “I left Beijing at the age of 16, when the Beijing Municipal Government called for me to go to Shanxi Quwo, the hometown of Peng Zhen, the then secretary of the Beijing Municipal Committee. The unforgettable thing is that when we went to the Beijing railway station, nearly 1,000 of us left at that time, and the Beijing government let us go to Shanxi by special train, directly to the Shanxi Houma railway station. The whole family sent us, the whole school teachers and students went to send. When the train left Beijing train station at 10 o’clock on August 5, the station could be said to be in tears.”
She went on to say, “Then six months after I went, my mother went to Shanxi and missed me so much that she almost had a nervous breakdown.”
With the current economic conditions in mainland China, it is indeed much easier to go Home and reunite with one’s family than during the Cultural Revolution, but Mr. He, a village official, reflected that the work at the grassroots level in the countryside is so complicated that it is impossible to go back on holidays and weekends and one has to keep an eye on the village.
On the other hand, the most criticized thing about the “going to the mountains and going to the countryside” during the Cultural Revolution is the gap in education for the youth. Most of them had only a junior high school education when they went to the countryside, and they ended up at the bottom of the fast-developing Chinese society with their interrupted education.
Ms. Zhang said: “Because we did not study Culture after we graduated from junior high school at the age of 16 and went to the countryside, some of us, a rather small number of us, still read books there. And then back to the city, with some jobs in the city does not converge with such a situation does exist. Especially after the reform and opening up, many people were eliminated, no cultural knowledge can not keep up with the times, and finally do some social bottom (work) it.”
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