(February 12, 1976)
To be printed and distributed to the Political Bureau. The question of educated youth seems to warrant special study; preparations should be made first, and then a meeting convened to resolve it.
February 12
[1]


This comment was written on a letter dated February 1, 1976, to Mao Zedong from Wu Guixian, alternate member of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and Vice Premier of the State Council. The letter stated that a letter to the Chairman and the Party Central Committee had recently been received from Zhou Rongguang and another educated youth of Beidu Commune, Xianyang Municipality, Shaanxi Province, reporting that the Shaanxi Provincial Planning Commission had issued a document initiating large-scale recruitment of workers throughout the province, targeting educated youth who had been sent down for more than two years, while rural returned youth were uniformly excluded from recruitment. Originally, the educated youth sent down in 1968 in the Xianyang area had already largely departed through three successive rounds of worker recruitment since 1970. In last year’s recruitment, most educated youth who had been sent down for two years again returned to the cities, and some youth farms were disbanded. Some production teams, fearing that educated youth could not be relied upon, made no long-term plans for their placement and training, thereby affecting the entire re-education work for educated youth.
[2]


On October 7, 1978, the CPC Central Committee issued a circular stating that the meeting on the question of educated youth, which Chairman Mao had instructed to be convened, could not be held while Chairman Mao was still alive due to the interference and sabotage of the meeting’s preparatory work by the “Gang of Four.” The Central Committee decided to convene a national conference on educated youth going up to the mountains and down to the countryside in October of that year.
From October 31 to December 10 of the same year, the National Conference on Educated Youth Going Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside was held in Beijing.
On December 12, the CPC Central Committee transmitted the “Summary of the National Conference on Educated Youth Going Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside” and the “Trial Regulations of the State Council on Several Issues Concerning Educated Youth Going Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside.”