While still not wanting to work in the mines, btw. That's the part that always kills me when I read these accounts, is the intelligentsia bitching about how they did so well in school, and these damn workers are taking up so many resources even though they didn't do well in school. There is no one going 'Then you go work in the mines if you think it is that easy.'

The good (bad) part of the Cultural Revolution was that that would forcibly happen. Professors who complained how easy the peasants had it were literally kidnapped by student organizations and dropped off in the country side to fend for themselves. The problem was that it was massively disorganized and a pretty easy system to abuse, which also gave the professors no incentive to actually grade anything. But there was a short-time, where if you said bullshit, you ate shit for it, and no one ever forgot about it.