CHINA: Graduates leave hustle and bustle of cities to taste country life, in hopes of furthering their careers

Three decades after Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution urging China's youth to till the land, tens of thousands of Chinese students are once again streaming out of cities to the countryside. For them, it's not only an ideological journey to experience rural life, but they also hope it will give themselves better job prospects. The number of young people making the trip to the country is believed to be the highest since the Cultural Revolution, a turbulent social and political movement which lasted a decade until 1976. Wang Xiaoliang is among about 150,000 university graduates who have left or will leave wealthy eastern cities this year and head to China's poorer rural regions, including Tibet in the west and Yunnan in the far south. From now on, in Beijing alone, every year at least 1000 graduates will be chosen from thousands of applicants and will go to the countryside to live like Wang Xiaoliang in Diaowo village. Lying north of Beijing, the population of Diaowo is just a couple of hundred. Beijing city dwellers find this a ideal place to a breathe fresh air as well as eat home cooked organic food. Wang Xiaoliang' came here to assist the Diaowo Village Chief, in particular to help the villagers to attract more customers. She gave up a well-paying job to move to Diaowo, where she earns just 300 USD a month. But she said she's happy she made the move. "I worked for a while after I graduated from university so I had some kind of experience. I wanted to come to the country and improve myself. I want to learn to work with farmers, village government officials and county government officials. This will be different experience. I'm hoping to learn something that I can never learn from text books," she said. Wang Xiaoliang's computer skills has brought the village many more customers. Liu Yunxiang, who runs a small family hotel offering room and board to city dwellers, said before Xiaoliang came along, she knew nothing about computers. "Many tourists are getting to know us and getting information through the internet. For example, they can check out our menu. When we first bought the computer, we had no idea how to use that. Then Xiaolang was here and she trained us," Liu said. A few years ago, relatively few students would have left the comfort and safety of the cities for China's countryside, which was seen as a dead-end route for their careers and aspirations. But job shortages had made rural living once again attractive among some Chinese graduates Liu Zheng, who studied bio-chemistry said the countryside provides him with vast swaths of land for personal development. "I think my main job and task is to teach the farmers how to use farming and agricultural technology. I want to bring high-tech farming to this village with the knowledge I learned from university. This is why I'm here," he said. The Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976, ruined millions of people's opportunity to receive education. When Mao said "It is very necessary for young students going to the country and to be educated by farmers" in 1968, more than 16 millions students flocked to rural areas. Ten per cent of city dwellers vanished. Unlike now, all of the students back then were educated by farmers, meaning they were learning farming and raising cattle. Cui Changhe, a village chief who lived through the Cultural Revolution said it's not the same today. "Thirty years ago, there were a lot of students in this village. But they were here to farm. There was nothing else for them to do but all kinds of physical labor. Now when the college students are here, it's totally different. Their job is to work on how to make the farmers rich. It's two different concepts." Cui explained. With the help of college students, the villagers are replacing their wheat and rice with pumpkin, mushroom and other popular products and city people who are tired of the delicate or processed food are finding nearby suburbs a paradise for a change.

ITN Source | October 6, 2006

Tags:. .furthering. .alone. .youth. .movement. .decades