Down to the Countryside Movement

The Down to the Countryside Movement was a government plan in China in the late 1960s and early 1970s. During the Cultural Revolution, anti-bourgeois thinking was very common. Mao Zedong said that richer youth from the cities would be sent to mountains or farming villages so they could learn from the workers and farmers there.

Down to the Countryside Movement
Traditional Chinese	上山下鄉運動
Simplified Chinese	上山下乡运动
Literal meaning	Up to the mountains and down to the villages
Transcriptions Standard Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin Shàngshān xiàxiāng yùndòng Yue: Cantonese Jyutping soeng5saan1 haa6hoeng1 wan6dung6

Many fresh high school graduates were forced out of the cities. They had to stay in far away areas of China. They became known as the Rusticated Youth of China Many of them lost the chance to go university. Some call them China's "lost generation." Famous authors who have written about their experiences during the movement include Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, Jiang Rong and Zhang Chengzhi, both of whom went to Inner Mongolia.

Bibliography

• Schoppa, R. Keith (2006), Revolution and Its Past: Identities and Change in Modern Chinese History, Pearson Education, pp. 349–356, ISBN 0-13-193039-7
• Benson, Linda (2002), China Since 1949, Semnar Studies in History, Pearson Education, pp. 38–44, ISBN 0-582-43739-3
• Zhong, Xueping; et al. (2001), Some of Us: Chinese Women Growing Up in the Mao Era, Rutgers University Press, ISBN 0-8135-2969-7