Professor Li-An Zhou of Guanghua School of Management collaborated with Yi Chen, Ziying Fan, and Xiaomin Gu to estimate the effects on rural education of the send-down movement during the Cultural Revolution. This research appeared in the top journal of economics, American Economic Review, in November 2020.

During the period of 1968-1978, about 16 million urban youth were mandated to resettle in the countryside. The mandatory nature of the movement provides a unique opportunity to examine how such an unprecedented scale of resettlement affected approximately 245 million of less-educated rural children. Results show that greater exposure to the sent-down youths significantly increased rural children’s educational achievement. The study reveals the important consequences of a historical event on rural education and sheds new light on the contribution of human capital accumulation in rural areas to China’s subsequent economic growth.

Background of the “Send-Down Movement”

In 1968, two years after the start of the Cultural Revolution, China’s central government launched the “send-down movement,” which mandated about 16 million urban youth to temporarily resettle in rural areas. This massive campaign lasted until the late 1970s. The villages receiving the “sent-down youths” (SDYs), typically junior and senior high school graduates, were generally located in poor areas where few people received more than a primary school education. Although the SDYs were expected to farm in the countryside, many of them were assigned to teach rural kids because of their educational advantages.

Unique Features of the “Send-Down Movement”

The send-down movement has three unique features that facilitate the empirical analysis of the paper. First, the resettlement was mobilized in a top-down and mandatory manner. Most urban youth could not choose whether (or where) to go. Those who refused to take part in the program could be accused of opposing the great strategy of Chairman Mao, which would have resulted in severe consequences. Second, migration was highly restricted in China at that time because of the household registration (hukou) system. The 1958 codification of the household registration system decreed that all internal migration was subject to approval by the local government. Finally, SDYs’ resettlement was temporary. By the time the rural children affected by the SDYs grew up, the vast majority of the SDYs had left the countryside, excluding possible mechanical effects that the better educated SDYs (and their offspring) were counted as rural residents.

Positive Impacts on both “Quantity” and “Quality” of Rural Education

To conduct this analysis, the research team digitized a unique county-level dataset on the flow of SDYs from over 3,000 book-length local gazetteers and matched it with individual-level population censuses and family surveys. Using a cohort difference-in-differences (DID) strategy, Professor Zhou and his coauthors find that the effect of the SDYs resulted in an increase of 17.6 million person-years of schooling in rural areas. Their main results are robust to a wide range of alternative specifications and robustness checks.

- The effect of the SDYs is greater among less-educated groups and regions (girls and less-developed counties), suggesting that the SDYs not only raised the overall level of rural education but also reduced socioeconomic inequality.

- As the movement came to an end and the SDYs gradually left the countryside, their effect declined but never vanished.

- Rural children who were exposed to SDYs were more likely to attain education beyond junior high level, pursued higher-skilled occupations including teachers, held more positive attitudes toward education, married later, and had smaller families.

Taken together, these results imply that the SDYs contributed to both the “quantity” and “quality” of rural education.

Confounding Factors

China’s rural education (especially at the secondary level) rapidly expanded since the late 1960s, a period that largely overlapped with the send-down movement. To control for this confounding factor, Professor Zhou and his coauthors collected county-by-year information on the number of local primary and secondary schools during the study period from local gazetteers. They show that although the educational expansion did improve rural children’s education, the estimated coefficients on the SDYs remain almost the same. They also controlled for the local intensity of the Cultural Revolution and the Great Famine.

Contributions to Existing Literature

This study contributes to three strands of literature.

- The first examines the channels of supplying human capital and their consequences in developing countries. Results from this study demonstrate that increasing the local supply of teachers is an important channel through which SDYs improved local children’s education. The team’s empirical results show that that the formation of human capital during this period might have laid down an important foundation for China’s economic growth in the reform era.

- The second literature investigates the social and economic consequences of China’s send-down movement on the SDYs. The program’s impact on the rural areas that accommodated the SDYs remains understudied. This research contributes to the scholarship of the send-down program in two ways: it uncovers the effects of the SDYs on rural human capital accumulation and their persistence; the team’s datasets also go further down to the county level and include the intra-province flow of SDYs, which accounted for 92.1% of total SDYs.

- Third, this paper adds to the literature on the persistence of human capital spillovers. The resettlement program that Professor Zhou and his coauthors investigate differs from those assessed in previous studies of human capital spillovers in at least three ways. First, the resettlement was temporary and mandatory, and there were few opportunities for internal migration for local people at that time. Second, the large scale of the resettlement and the number of local residents affected were unprecedented. Third, the main motivation for the send-down movement was not to improve rural education but to address severe urban unemployment. Therefore, the improvement in rural education brought about by the SDYs was an unintended consequence of the movement.

Future Research Avenues

Since it was a mandatory and uncompensated migration from the SDYs’ perspective, the “send-down movement” also caused many negative consequences for the SDYs (such as deprivation of further educational opportunities). How to evaluate the cost side of the movement is an important topic worthy of future research.