The first batch of educated youth began at 1950, and the total number of educated youth who went to the countryside from 1950s to 1970s was estimated to be between120,000 and180,000.

In China, educated youth refers to young people who voluntarily moved from cities to rural areas or corps to farm, develop and defend the frontier from 1950 to the end of the Cultural Revolution. In fact, most of these people have only received junior high school or high school education.

After the founding of People's Republic of China (PRC), in order to solve the employment problem in cities, urban youth were organized to transfer to rural areas, especially remote rural areas, from the mid-1950s.

As early as 1953, People's Daily published an editorial "Organizing College Graduates to Participate in Agricultural Productive Labor". In 1955, Mao Zedong put forward that "the countryside is a vast world, where you can make great achievements." It became the slogan of educated youth going to the countryside later.

From this year on, the Youth League began to organize farms to encourage and organize young people to take part in the reclamation movement. At that time, the artist Zhu Xuanxian's 1958 work "Intellectual Youth at Work" vividly recorded the picture of intellectual youth in that particular era in Beidahuang Agricultural Reclamation.

1962 proposed to organize a nationwide movement to go to the countryside. 1964 the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China has set up a leading group for this purpose.

1966, under the influence of the cultural revolution, the college entrance examination stopped. By 1968, many middle school graduates can neither enter universities nor find jobs. In addition, the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution in 1966-1968 made China's leading bodies realize that they needed to find ways to resettle these young people so as not to get out of control.

196865438+On February 22nd, Mao Zedong instructed People's Daily to publish an article entitled "We also have two hands, and we are not idle in the city", in which Mao Zedong was quoted as saying, "Is it necessary for educated youth to go to the countryside to receive re-education for poor middle peasants?" 1969, many young people went to the countryside. The whole country has also begun to organize middle school graduates to be assigned to rural areas.