why are the boys re-educated

During China’s Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and the 1970s, many people who were perceived as ‘bourgeois’ were sent to detention or labor camps. Urban students were taken out of high school and sent to the countryside to be ‘re-educated’ by rural peasants. There, they would work at manual labor alongside the peasants. The goal was to make urban youths more loyal to the Communist government, and to curb unemployment in the cities. The authorities also hoped that these educated young people would bring new knowledge to the remote areas they visited (Wu).