Forty years ago, Red Guard Zhang Fen was among 17 million zhiqing or intellectual youth sent down to the countryside to learn from the peasants. Today she's still there, it's home. Lin Jiangyang visits. The most unwilling to come, but the last to leave" - 60-year-old Zhang Fen sums up her 40 years in one of China's most impoverished rural areas.

Like driftwood left high on the beach long after political tides have turned, Zhang is one of the last of the urban zhiqing, (intellectual youth) sent by Chairman Mao Zedong down to the countryside. They were to be "re-educated" by peasants during the "cultural revolution" (1966-76).

Unlike most zhiqing, or rusticated youth, Zhang stayed on long after the "cultural revolution" and the passing of Mao in 1976: She's a city-bred girl from Chongqing, who gave up electricity, a comfortable home and adequate food for a grinding hand-to-mouth existence.

Three young women zhiqing transplant rice in Sichuan Province in this 1960s file photo. [CFP]

Sitting in a ramshackle wooden home in her poor mountain village in southwest China, Zhang has watched from afar as her siblings and childhood friends prospered in urban China's rapid development.

She plans a return visit at the end of the year to downtown Chongqing, where she last marveled at once-familiar places in 2003.

"I couldn't recognize places around Chaotianmen Square where I grew up. Skyscrapers lined the road, and they were so high I could hardly see the tops. There were endless streams of cars," she recalls, her expression still one of surprise.

Her old bamboo home, a 10-minute walk from Chaotianmen Square, had been torn down and replaced by a 12-story building. In 1989, it was still there, and downtown Chongqing was just beginning to change.

Last zhiqing

Today the journey home takes seven hours, but in October 1969, when Zhang and 11 other city teenagers left for Lishui Village, it took them two days and two nights to travel the 350 kilometers eastward from downtown Chongqing.

It was a year after Mao issued his directive to "send educated urban youths to the countryside for re-education by poor and lower-middle-class peasants."

Zhang can reel off verbatim Mao's order after 41 years. They started a campaign to eliminate the "three differences" - between cities and countryside, between workers and farmers, and between physical labor and mental work.

Other motives included restoring order in cities after two years of "class struggle" and reducing high unemployment among urban youths.

From 1968 to 1980, when the campaign was officially terminated, about 17 million young people went to the countryside. Zhang was one of the very few zhiqing who chose to stay.

"I can do most farm work and I have to do it, such as plowing paddy fields with a buffalo and transplanting rice seedlings (by hand)," she says. Here, no machine can be employed.

There's black earth under her fingernails; she has hard calluses, arthritic fingers and swollen joints from her life of labor.

"I've had more happiness than sadness in the last 40 years," she says. "When I felt tired or distracted, I would sing myself revolutionary songs popular in Chairman Mao's time, or songs of Chairman Mao's quotations."

Zhang was born into a poor family in April 1950 in downtown Chongqing. Her father was a road-maintenance worker. With a monthly salary of about 30 yuan (US$12 at that time), he supported Zhang and her two younger brothers through school until the outbreak of the 10-year "cultural revolution" in 1966.

Zhang left her middle school and traveled the country like other students at the time. In Beijing, she and other Red Guards were greeted by Mao on October 18, 1966 - "the most exciting moment of my life," she recalls.

Despite her revolutionary fervor, she resisted leaving the city. "Everyone knew life in the countryside was bitter. I was afraid."