Chairman Mao's policy differed from Chinese President Liu Shaoqi's early 1960s sending-down policy in its political context. President Liu Shaoqi instituted the first sending-down policy to redistribute excess urban population following the Great Chinese Famine and the Great Leap Forward. Mao's stated aim for the policy was to ensure that urban students could "develop their talents to the full" through education amongst the rural population.

Many fresh high school graduates, who became known as the so-called sent-down youth (also known in China as "educated youth" and abroad as "rusticated youth"), were forced out of the cities and effectively exiled to remote areas of China. Some commentators consider these people, many of whom lost the opportunity to attend university, "China's Lost Generation".

Also, by the end of 1968, it was clear that there were too few controls against the violence of the Red Guard. Fearing that the economic downturn would worsen (as it had during the Great Leap Forward), a new policy called the Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside Movement was introduced, better known simply as the Down to the Countryside Movement. In truth, it was meant to reeducate the students and workers who had stopped listening to them.

Dai Sijie's Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress has received great praise for its take on life for the young people sent to rural villages of China during the movement. Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping was also among the youth sent to rural areas.