I worked with a very well educated Chinese man who had been caught up in that. He had a terrible, and on occasion terrifying, time. I'm pretty confident that it didn't make him a better party member. As far as I remember from what little he was willing to say about the time the only thing it made him better at was catching stray dogs to eat.

Xi Jinping himself had an awful time too according to a podcast I listened to about his life. But he later changed his tune in recent years when hyping up the old times became popular again, similar to the Stalin years is popular again in Russia.

Some variation of this was not uncommon in general. In USSR, college students were routinely used as forced agricultural labor during harvest season for up to 30 days. AFAIK something similar existed in other Soviet bloc countries.

My parents hated it, and I don't think I have ever met anyone who remembered that experience fondly for any reason. If anything, the kind of stories that people tell about it seem to imply that it was more divisive than uniting - the rural folk who were doing that as a permanent job were both resentful of "city slickers" and annoyed at the fact that they can't do it "properly", while the students would very quickly tire of being yelled at and start treating their hosts with contempt.