China sends unemployed graduates to teach countryside peasants in 'Mao policy'

我爱猫眯

By Malcolm Moore at East China Normal University, Minhang
Last Updated: 4:23PM GMT 26 Dec 2008

Forty years after millions of students were sent to the provinces during the Cultural Revolution, the economic downturn has forced students to head for rural areas once again.

A record 5.6 million students will graduate this year, according to government figures, and jobs are scarce. They will have to compete with the 700,000 graduates from 2007 who remain jobless. Major international companies are now receiving tens of thousands of desperate applications for every available post.

In response, the Chinese government has turned the clock back to embrace Chairman Mao's "Shang Shan Xia Xiang", or "Climb the Mountains and Go down to the Villages" policy from 1968.

Almost 17 million teens were sent out of China's cities in the belief that they would be transformed by living among ideologically pure peasants. Many members of China's current leadership spent spells in the countryside, and President Hu Jintao helped build a dam on the Yellow River for a year.

The scheme continued until 1980, but was criticised as a means of expelling "class enemies", or anyone who dared to dissent, from the centres of Chinese power.

Next year, however, the government "will recruit over 30,000 college graduates to go to rural and western regions to teach," said the ministry of Education, adding that it had rapidly expanded the scheme in order to cope with the rising levels of unemployment.

Not only is the jobs market stuttering, but the flow of students is greater than ever before. Between 1999 and 2006, the number of graduates quintupled, flooding the labour market and depressing wages.

"Graduates who choose to work in remote and rural areas for a required period will be exempt from paying college tuition fees and the government will pay off their student loans," promised the ministry.

The People's Liberation Army is also hiring. Students who enlist have been promised the chance to study in army universities and of "quick promotions".

Gao Hui, a 20-year-old postgraduate political sciences student at East China Normal University on the outskirts of Shanghai said that she had "always wanted to be a teacher; it was either teaching or joining the army".

Miss Gao, and three other students had to come top of their class to qualify for a chance to be sent for a year to Wuding, a town of around 300,000 people in Yunnan, a province that borders Vietnam, Laos and Burma in China's south west.

"We had to take a written exam and then had face-to-face interviews to get this post," said Miss Gao, adding that they had beaten dozens of other students to the position because of their ideological conviction.

After the four students from East China University have spent a year teaching 16 and 17-year-olds in a middle school, they will return to Shanghai to resume their postgraduate studies.

Their only fear is not harsh living conditions, but whether their limited teaching experience will be a hindrance, they chime. They will each have their costs paid, and will earn a stipend of 600 rmb (£60) a month, more than twice the average wage of a peasant, but a fraction of what they could be paid in Shanghai.

"We are very excited. Peasants are simple-minded, honest and have integrity," said Wu Chenhao, a 20-year-old maths student. "As a Shanghainese, I need to broaden my vision." She added: "Among the other students there are many who are trying to go to the countryside in order to put off entering the jobs market, because of the pressures of employment.

But I think after a year with the peasants they will be different people.

They cannot help but change."