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

The short answer

• The Red Guards had served their purpose. The students Mao had hailed as the revolution’s vanguard became a problem for him. By 1968 factions fought with guns, universities such as Tsinghua had become battlegrounds, and the army was tired of policing them. In July Mao told Red Guard leaders they had failed him; workers’ propaganda teams took over campuses. Sending students to the countryside removed them from politics without admitting that the movement had gone wrong. They were now told they needed re-education.
• No jobs in the cities. The cities faced a large group of school leavers without work. Two years of fighting had disrupted factories, and schools and universities had closed in 1966. The baby-boom generation born in the 1950s was leaving school, but city governments could neither feed nor employ it. Villages and frontier farms received the burden without the countryside having a say. Household registration made the transfer enforceable: refusal meant a young person could not legally live or eat in the city.
• Mao’s faith in the peasant revolution. Mao’s own revolution had been won in the villages. He feared that educated city people might become a privileged class separated from the masses, and wanted peasants to teach the young while labor toughened them. The term “re-education” gave a practical measure the force of a moral duty. Parents who wanted their children home had to argue against the Chairman’s words, and opposition could look like opposition to the revolution itself.
• An army that had become indispensable. The army had made itself indispensable by restoring order through revolutionary committees. The 1969 border war with the Soviet Union increased its importance. Officers filled the Central Committee, and their leader Lin Biao became Mao’s designated successor. Mao had used the army to defeat the Party, but its accumulated power now alarmed him. Lin’s position depended on Mao’s favor, and that favor could be withdrawn.

What it changed

Washington becomes the answer. The Soviet threat remained on China’s northern border after Lin’s fall. Mao and Zhou Enlai accelerated their secret approach to the United States, and Nixon’s visit was confirmed within months. In October 1971 the People’s Republic took China’s seat at the United Nations. Zhou managed the crisis at home as well as the opening abroad, becoming the most powerful figure after Mao.

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

Deng Xiaoping returns. The return of purged officials supplied Mao with experienced administrators and gave those officials a quiet constituency for ending campaigns. Deng Xiaoping became a vice-premier again in 1973 and soon ran the government for the ailing Zhou Enlai. That position made him the radicals’ main target and prepared the succession struggle that would decide China after Mao.

A generation that remembered. Sent-down youth began returning to the cities from 1978, carrying memories of lost years and skepticism about slogans. Their memoirs, stories and films, beginning with the “scar literature” of the late 1970s, shaped China’s memory of the Mao years. Village life had shown them rural poverty and how little slogans could change it. Some, including Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang, later led the country.