Politicization of Education, Institutionalization of Discrimination, and the Maoist Utopia: The Transfer of Urban Youth to Rural Areas in China, 1962–66

Before the Cultural Revolution in 1966-1976, close to 1.3 million youths in urban China were sent to the countryside. Starting in 1964, Shangshan xiaxiang (transfer of urban youth to the countryside) was established as a national policy and acquired the basic qualities of a mass campaign. While the campaign was an extension of Beijing’s general program of alleviating the economic and demographic pressure on urban China, it reflected some ominous changes in China’s political climate. At a time when Mao Zedong was trying to regain his lost ground in the Chinese Communist Movement in the wake of the calamitous Great Lear Forward, he turned China’s education into a battlefield of class struggle. Political indoctrination not only became an integral part of the curriculum but, in fact, threatened to dominate the classroom in the country. In the name of the revolution, the state also imposed on the admissions process of colleges and high schools nationwide a policy of brazen discrimination against students from politically unreliable families who were largely victims of the political campaigns in the 1950s and 60s. This policy led to the unique nature of the pre-Cultural Revolution zhiqing, i.e., the urban youth sent down to the countryside. Once the best students at their schools but ruthless deprived of their right to formal education, many members of this group were at once dreamers of the Maoist utopia and helpless victims of the totalitarian politics.

            This paper aims to describe and explain the intricate relationship between the rise of the shangshan xiaxiang campaign and the totalitarian politics in China’s education in the first half of the 1960s. It argues that the campaign was flawed morally, intellectually, and economically and therefore doomed to failure from the very beginning. Powerpoint will be used in the presentation of this paper.