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The 'Down to the Countryside Movement' (literally "Up to the mountains and down to the villages") was a political movement in the People's Republic of China in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As a result of the anti-bourgeois thinking prevalent during the Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong declared that privileged urban youths should be sent to mountainous areas or farming villages, in order that they could learn from the workers and farmers there. As a result, many fresh high school graduates 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". Famous authors who have written about their experiences during the movement include Jiang Rong and Zhang Chengzhi, both of whom went to Inner Mongolia.