Arrival of Young Talent: The Send-down Movement and Rural Education in China: Further Reply

Gong et al. (2021) made additional challenges to our original paper (Chen et al., 2020A) after we made a detailed reply in Chen et al. (2021) to Gong et al. (2020). In this further reply, we use data-based evidence to demonstrate how Gong et al. (2021) misread or/and misinterpreted our paper and codes, as they did in their earlier comments, and even twisted the sample or coding to misguide readers. To invalidate our results, they imposed several "brutal'' adjustments to our dependent variable (years of education), which are either groundless or simply misleading. They claimed to find evidence for the positive effect of SDYs on rural illiteracy, which turned out to be a shaky result. After applying our baseline DID specification to their regression, the so-called positive effect on illiteracy turned negative and marginally significant, which is consistent with our SDYs story.