A long march to the countryside and back: The Chinese Cultural Revolution, bureaucracy, and rustication

My overall research question is what roles did public administration and bureaucracy play in implementing the Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside program of the Chinese Cultural Revolution? Also known as the rustication or sent-down program, it lasted from 1968 to 1980 and transferred 17 million urban Chinese youth to rural villages, state and military farms, and Inner Mongolian grasslands. Its intent was to reeducate sent-downs through the study of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Chairman Mao Zedong Thought, integration into peasant life or military organization, and "tempering" through hard physical labor. The research is based primarily on extensive interviews of 44 former "sent-downs" who subsequently returned to the cities. It frames rustication as part of a longstanding struggle within the CCP between two competing visions for China's economic development: Mao and his supporters' desire to base it on Marxian principles versus those who viewed techno-rational bureaucratic organization as central to growth. The research examines the inception, organization, administrative culture, and operation of the rustication bureaucracy. It concentrates on how urban youth were induced to comply with the program, transported, resettled, integrated into daily life and work at their destinations, and eventually returned to the cities. It also investigates differences in the experiences of male and female sent-downs. Among my main conclusions are that the rustication program was: 1) highly efficient on the sending side, but less so on the receiving end; 2) associated with a substantial change in China's administrative culture in which guanxi (reliance on relationships and corruption to gain favorable discretionary decisions) went from infrequent to standard operating procedure, especially as sent-downs became eligible for return to the cities; 3) harsher on female sent-downs, who were highly vulnerable to sexual violence and predation, and under social and work pressures to marry local residents; and 4) related to the growth of administrative discretion and privilege. I further conclude that whereas the sent-downs were tempered, the effects of reeducation in the countryside were somewhat counterproductive. Ironically, rustication promoted some types of bureaucratic behavior that the Cultural Revolution was intended to destroy.