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 ???.

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.