Did sending urban youth to villages achieve Mao’s aims?

The short answer

• The Red Guards had served their purpose. Mao sent the Red Guards away because they had become a problem. By 1968 the student factions were fighting each other with guns, universities such as Tsinghua had become battlegrounds, and the army was tired of policing them. In July 1968 Mao told Red Guard leaders that they had failed him, and workers’ propaganda teams took over the campuses. Sending the students to the countryside removed them from politics without admitting that the movement had gone wrong. The same young people who had been told they were the revolution’s vanguard were now told they needed re-education.
• No jobs in the cities. Factories had been disrupted by two years of fighting, schools and universities had closed in 1966, and the large generation born in the baby boom of the 1950s was leaving school with nowhere to go. City governments could not feed or employ them. Sending them to villages and frontier farms shifted the burden onto the countryside, which had no say in the decision. Household registration made the move enforceable, because a young person who refused could not legally live or eat in the city.
• Mao’s faith in the peasant revolution. Mao believed that city people, and especially the educated, risked becoming a privileged class cut off from the masses. His own revolution had been won in the villages, and he wanted the young to be toughened by labour and taught by peasants. The language of “re-education” turned a practical measure into a moral duty, which made opposing it look like opposing the revolution itself. Parents who hoped to keep their children at home had to argue against the Chairman’s own words.
• An army that had become indispensable. The army had restored order through the revolutionary committees, and the border war with the Soviet Union in 1969 made it more important still. Its leader, Lin Biao, became Mao’s designated successor and its officers filled the Central Committee. That concentration of power alarmed Mao, who had used the army to defeat the Party and now feared the army itself. Lin Biao’s position depended on Mao’s favour, and the same favour could be withdrawn.

What it changed

Washington becomes the answer. With Lin gone and the Soviet threat on the northern border, Mao and Zhou Enlai accelerated the secret approach to the United States. Within months Nixon’s visit was confirmed, and in October 1971 the People’s Republic took China’s seat at the United Nations. The crisis at home and the opening abroad moved together, and Zhou Enlai, who managed both, became the most powerful figure after Mao.

The soldiers sent back to barracks. Lin’s leading generals were arrested within days of the crash, civilian Party committees regained authority in the provinces, and in December 1973 Mao rotated the commanders of eight military regions so that none could build a personal power base. The period of military government was over, although soldiers remained powerful. Mao had used the army to break the Party, and then used the Party to rein in the army.

Deng Xiaoping returns. Needing experienced administrators, Mao allowed many purged officials back to work. Deng Xiaoping returned as a vice-premier in 1973 and soon ran the government for the ailing Zhou Enlai, which made him the radicals’ main target and set up the struggle over the succession that would decide China after Mao. Rehabilitated officials became a quiet constituency for ending the campaigns.

A generation that remembered. The sent-down youth returned to the cities from 1978 with lost years and a sceptical view of slogans. Their memoirs, stories and films, beginning with the “scar literature” of the late 1970s, shaped how China remembered the Mao years, and some of them, including Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang, later led the country. Their years in the villages taught them how poor rural China was and how little slogans could change it.