A report on April 10, stated that the Central Committee (CC) of the Communist Youth League (CYL), membership of which is for young people between the ages of fourteen and twenty-eight, recently announced that over the next three years it will send ten million college students to the countryside, in order to implement president Xi Jinping’s “important thoughts on youth work” and his Strategic Plan for the Vitalization of Rural Areas. The CYL issued the “Opinions on Further Implementing the Movement of Rural Vitalization and Accomplishment for Youth.” It states that the CYL will let 'Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era', also known as Xi Jinping Thought, enter into young people’s minds and show in their actions. The Opinions ask China’s young generation to participate in the rural projects to improve the local humanitarian environment without mentioning the details. It also includes entrepreneur projects where the young people start businesses and get rich. In addition, there are rural e- commerce fostering projects which are supposed to help 10,000 young people to use e-commerce to create jobs in the agricultural sector. College students will need to 'volunteer' themselves to go to poor regions to gain experience.

(Comment: The move is reminiscent of the Mao Zedong era. In 1968, Mao believed that “it was necessary for young intellectuals to go to the countryside and be re-educated by the poor peasants” and he launched the “Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside Movement”, when more than 16 million young Chinese intellectuals, including Chinese president Xi Jinping, were forced to relocate to the countryside during the ten-year Great Cultural Revolution between 1966 and 1976. Many parents are now worried that the State might not issue a diploma or degree to youth unless they go to the countryside.)