Overurbanization, Rustication of Urban-Educated Youths, and Politics of Rural Transformation: The Case of China

Many developing countries are currently experiencing an increasing level of urban unemployment despite a credible rise in industrial output and gross national income. The urban sector in many of these countries is beset with educated unemployment and the development of the rural sector has been limited by a failure to recruit persons with education and skills to staff the modern in the rural areas. The skills and training needed to operate an agriculture supporting system are as advanced and complex as those needed by the modern sector and in most instances beyong the capacity of illiterate peasants to master. Yet most underdeveloped countries have failed to attract and put to work in the rural areas those individuals who have received modern education and cannot find employment in the urban areas. Discussion describes and analyzes the attempt of China to solve this contradiction by resettling urban school graduates to the countryside and employing them there as catalytic agents of rural development. In December 1968 China formally revived the hsia hsiang shang shan yun tung down to the countryside and up to the mountain movement hereafter referred to as the rustication movement. With this movement millions of urban school graduates and other youths have been transferred to and resettled in the countryside and frontiers. The target population of the rustication movement has been graduates of urban primary schools secondary schools general universities and specialized technical colleges who have terminated formal education and who are not assigned to a job or post in the cities; young urban residents street youth who are not attending school and have no steady employment; and the cadres of the party the government or industrial commercial enterprises whose skills are not needed in the urban areas but are badly needed in the rural areas. Estimates of the total number of rusticated urban educated youths vary from 10-15 million. In 1957-58 Chinese planners and policymakers formulated a dualistic approach to economic development. This combined capital-intensive methods in the modern sector in the urban areas and labor intensive methods in agriculture and indigenous industry in rural areas. Since 1969 Peking has revived this dualistic approach but with more careful planning. Rusticated urban school graduates are intended to be 1 of the key instruments in implementing this dualistic approach. They are expected because of their formal education and reading ability to be skillful and productive after a year or so of on-the-job training. They are called upon to be ordinary agricultural producers while simultaneously playing the role of catalysts in diffusing modern attitudes skills and knowledge and in establishing and operating modern social infrastructures in the rural villages all in the interest of accelerating rural transformation. In sending educated youths to the countryside the Communist party is simply reviving although somewhat modifying an imperial tradition.