He quoted some statistics, which show that from 1950 to 1980, the proportion of urban residents in the world increased from 28.4 percent to 41.3 percent, and that of developing countries increased from 16.2 percent to 30.5 percent. While in China, the number only increased from 11.2 percent to 19.4 percent.

Liu's conclusion is that the movement neither changed poverty levels in the rural areas of China, nor reached the original goal of alleviating the unemployment pressure in the urban areas with the returning of many educated youth to their own cities.

Both Ding and Liu pointed out that some people try to whitewash that period of history just because they failed to regard the movement as a disaster on the whole.

"The group of 'educated youth' was complicated. The political treatment at that time, the way out and the life in later years were different. Some people became the beneficiaries of the movement," said the authors.

Today, many Chinese know the history of this period of time through literary works by people who were "educated youth" at that time or from movies or TV series reflecting this movement. Since the 1980s, quite a number of literary works or memoirs have appeared on Chinese bookshelves, but the historical books on this subject are still few and far between.

First completed in 1996, the book History of Chinese Zhiqing was published in 1998. Now 11 years later, the new version is seen by critics as the best work about the movement published to date on Chinese mainland.

The Movement of Going to the Mountain Areas and the Countryside

In December 1968, Mao Zedong, then leader of China, gave a directive that it is necessary for "educated youth" in cities to work in the countryside. Since then, a large-scale movement of students going to the mountain areas and the countryside had been carried out throughout the country. In more than 10 years, around 17 million middle-school students in cities were sent to rural areas, most in the remote and underdeveloped regions.

Since 1979, the majority of those "educated youth" began to return to their own cities, while some stayed in the countryside permanently.

The movement rewrote the destiny of a whole generation of Chinese, as they lost the best years of receiving normal education.

(Source: History of Chinese Zhiqing)