From Disillusioned Returned Youth to Party Propagandists: Rural Educated Youth and their Involvement in Rural Clubs in Southeast Shanxi, 1961–1965

Abstract:In the period from 1961 to 1965, the Chinese Communist Party forced a vast number of rural educated youth to return to their countryside homes. Despite the party’s initial expectations, they had trouble readjusting to rural life. This merited political attention, as the scheme was associated with the party’s aim to cultivate revolutionary successors at the grassroots during the Socialist Education movement. The party therefore attempted to make use of the rural club, a popular cultural entity in the Chinese countryside, to transform the disillusioned rural educated youth into qualified grassroots propagandists. However, such transformation should not be understood as a mere top-down initiative. As this article demonstrates, rural educated youth enthusiastically participated in rural clubs. By leveraging their identity as simultaneously rural and educated, they proved themselves the ideal vehicle for ideological conditioning in the countryside, which enabled them to bargain with the party for upward mobility.