Chapter Three focuses on how the network of connections established by the sent-down youth movement provided rural leaders a way of bypassing state planning policies to obtain directly from Shanghai materials and equipment they desperately needed to establish small local industries. At a time when state planning policies favored large industrial centers such as Shanghai, most remote rural counties had almost no way to acquire resources, in spite of Mao’s advocacy of rural industry. Were it not for the sent-down youth movement, these county leaders would have had no connection to Shanghai, nor would agencies in Shanghai have had reasons to donate materials to places unfamiliar and irrelevant to them. Now, when rural local leaders issued requests for equipment, officials in Shanghai hustled to identify bureaus that could satisfy them, as the otherwise far more powerful Shanghai municipal government found itself dependent on small and peripheral local governments to take care of the city’s youth.

Chapter Five explores how, in the wake of the 1973 campaign, the Shanghai government intensified efforts to help urban youth leave the fields, launching projects such as technical workshops in Shanghai in which youth could participate during their home visits as well as distance-learning courses offered for sent-down youth in rural areas. This promotion of education and technical training enhanced the opportunities for sent-down youth to escape fieldwork and take on less physically taxing jobs in rural areas as office clerks, accountants, electrical engineers, machine technicians, and barefoot teachers and doctors. In some areas, the Shanghai government provided material and financial resources for the establishment of small factories and sent-down youth stations; urban outposts scattered across the rural landscape that were entirely independent of the village economy. Although these programs were ostensibly initiated to support the sent-down youth movement, they inadvertently intensified a new boundary in the countryside that divided sent-down youth and villagers. They also turned urban youth into educated and skilled rural residents who became some of the most privileged residents in the countryside.

Chapter Two focuses on the difficulties of settling urban youth in remote villages. From the beginning, the sent-down youth movement was beset with problems relating to the gap between urban and rural conditions. The municipal government received a multitude of reports that urban youth experienced inadequate housing, food, and medical facilities, and that physical labor was backbreaking and potentially injurious for individuals raised in the city. This chapter calls attention to the perspective of rural officials who, completely unprepared for the arrival of urban teenagers, faced the overwhelming job of accommodating and managing them. Given the paucity of rural resources, sent-down youth often required provisions from the city. While youth were geographically distant from their homes, and may have bemoaned the loss of their legal residence in Shanghai when their hukouwas transferred to a rural production brigade, they maintained close connections with their families in the city, on whom they depended for both financial and material goods. Most importantly, their welfare was continually monitored and managed by the Shanghai government through the sent-down youth office and its teams of Shanghai cadres stationed in areas where the city’s youth were sent—the weiwentuan ???.

The Epilogue explores experiences of former sent-down youth in the context of the post-Mao economic reforms, particularly their reconnection with the villages in which they had lived during the Cultural Revolution. It looks at the formation of sent-down youth associations in major cities throughout China and the organization of delegations of former sent-down youth to visit the villages. It also looks at initiatives by county leaders to cultivate financial investment by former sent-down youth, their establishment of sent-down youth museums, and the publication of memoirs by former sent-down youth in their counties.

By the mid-1970s the sent-down youth movement was beset with insurmountable problems. As Chapter Six demonstrates, an increasing number of urban youth did not want to stay in the countryside, while urban cadres became equally unwilling to join the weiwentuan teams dispatched to provide relief. Relations between rural governments and the weiwentuan from Shanghai became conflictual, paralleled by mutual antagonism between urban youth and rural leaders. At the same time, weiwentuan reports on conditions of sent-down youth became desperately pessimistic about the prospects of long-term settlement of urban youth in the countryside. The flow of youth back to Shanghai increased, primarily without official sanction. What stand out in archival reports are the ways in which the Shanghai government, weiwentuan, and rural officials, all charged to support the sent-down youth movement, began a collaboration to enable youth to return to the city and re-establish their official urban residency. By the time dramatic protests by youth on the Yunnan state farms took place in 1978–1979—commonly cited as bringing the movement to a halt—almost all the Shanghai youth assigned to production brigades had already left or were in the process of leaving.

This chapter examines the mobilization of the program following the promulgation of Mao’s 1968 directive mandating that urban youth be sent to the countryside. The movement initially seemed to provide solutions for some of Shanghai’s most pressing problems: unemployment, chaos associated with the Red Guard movement, and gang violence. In a widespread campaign to enlist participation, the municipal government organized mass rallies and parades celebrating idealistic youth who volunteered to sacrifice their privileged urban life for this new revolutionary cause. It also mobilized thousands of urban officials, school administrators, teachers, and neighborhood representatives to work relentlessly to persuade middle and high school graduates to register for assignment to remote rural areas. Most urban youth agreed to leave the city, some enthusiastically and some begrudgingly. Mobilization efforts in Shanghai reveal class dimensions of popular responses. Ironically, it was the most marginalized residents of Shanghai—those outside the state employment system who earned a living by working in private trades as peddlers, barbers, carpenters, or tailors—who knew how to help their children support themselves without relying on government employment and thereby circumvent relocation to the countryside.

Chapter Four revisits the controversial issue of sexual assault of female sent-down youth. Archival records make it clear that the compilation of statistics and the investigation of sexual misconduct were part of a campaign triggered by a state directive in 1973 concerning “harm to sent-down youth,” a campaign that pressured local officials to identify, expose, and investigate locals who had romantic relations with female sent-down youth, and punish individuals found guilty of sexual assault. This was not limited to rape, but included a range of behaviors and relationships previously deemed inappropriate and now classified as criminal: seduction, adultery, and molestation as well as flirting, dating, and affairs. Regardless of what type of intimacy was the basis of accusation and investigation, in almost every case individuals found to be guilty perpetrators of abuse were local men, and those they abused were urban women. Male sent-down youth who engaged in similar intimacies with fellow sent-down youth or local women were exempted from the investigations, as were local men who engaged in such intimacies with rural women.

Of all the political campaigns that reconfigured daily life in the first three decades of the People’s Republic of China, the sent-down youth movement that sent 17 million urban youth to live in rural China in 1968–1980 is one of the most vividly remembered and hotly debated. Mao’s 1968 call for re-education catapulted urban youth into a world of rural poverty they would otherwise never have known. Memorialized in fiction, films, art exhibits, and even an orchestral performance, the movement is commonly branded a misguided revolution, a forced relocation, and a sacrifice of youth. The victimization of sent-down youth has been invoked to symbolize the suffering of all Chinese people during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). Whether former sent-down youth look back on that era as one of deprivation that handicapped them or as one that honed their ability to navigate adversity, their years living in the countryside constituted the pivotal experience for a generation that came of age during the Cultural Revolution.