Educated youth, referred to as educated youth for short, is the historical title of People's Republic of China (PRC) (PRC) for a specific group in a specific period. The original meaning of educated youth refers to educated youth in general or youth with higher education in particular. The educated youth usually refers to the young people who were voluntarily or forced to be sent from the city to the countryside to be farmers from the 1950 s until the end of the Cultural Revolution. In fact, most of these people have only received junior high school or high school education, and a few have received college education or above.

During the Cultural Revolution, a political movement called on young intellectuals to go to the countryside, abandoned traditional teaching and excessively improved their practical functions. All school-age youth, except soldiers, basically belong to the scope of conscription. Going to the countryside did not begin with the Cultural Revolution. Advocated in the 1950s, started in the 1960s and ended in the late 1970s. For the educated youth at that time, going to the countryside to eliminate the "three major differences" (that is, the difference between workers and peasants, the difference between urban and rural areas, and the difference between manual labor and mental labor) was full of positive idealism. A large number of young people such as Xing Yanzi, Hou Juan and Dong Jiageng are their typical representatives. The movement of going to the countryside is indeed a harsh exercise for most educated youth, and objectively it has not solved the three major differences in rural areas of China. Because of the different political backgrounds of educated youth families in the political and historical environment with class struggle as the key link at that time, the political treatment of educated youth returning to the city was also different. There is also the phenomenon of going to the countryside to exercise gold-plated and going through the motions, and the so-called forever taking root in the countryside to do revolution. In some places, incidents of rape and persecution of rural educated youth also occur frequently. In particular, most of the educated youth who returned to the city in the last issue were children of their families who were persecuted during the Cultural Revolution and finally liberated and rehabilitated. They are the last batch of documents issued by the central government and reported by the provinces to implement their real names. At this point, the educated youth returned to the city during the Cultural Revolution.

After tens of millions of educated youth returned to the city, there was no confusion caused by some officials not being able to accommodate so many people. On the contrary, because this decision was welcomed by the people of the whole country, urban society and rural society were more "harmonious". The sudden strengthening of the national family planning policy in the early 1980s was the Communist Party of China (CPC)'s response to the educated youth returning to the city.