Chinese students take to the hills
By Cristian Segura
BEIJING - City-dweller Wang Weiwei and his friends are the main subject of
gossip in Xianying, a small village of around 8,000 inhabitants located in
Beijing Municipality.
Wang's group, with its trendy and urban style, stands out in a village
community that still works everyday in rice fields with donkeys and their bare
hands. They are all Beijing university graduates that have accepted an offer to
work as counselors in village administrations - jobs that are part of a
nationwide plan conceived by the central government to modernize public
services in rural areas of the country.
Thousands of university graduates have been sent to the China's countryside as
part of a plan reminiscent of similar steps taken under the Cultural Revolution
(1966-1976). But the Cultural Revolution was a wave of oppression against
anyone considered
bourgeois or a threat to the revolutionary course laid by chairman Mao Zedong
and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and this time the rural exodus has very
different goals.
During the Cultural Revolution, millions of people were prosecuted and tortured
as young students were moved to the countryside to learn the spirit of the
communist revolution. "Going to work in the countryside and mountain areas" was
compulsory for every urban student. But 33 years later, students are going
voluntarily with the goal of spreading the achievements of the urban society.
"They send us to the countryside because here they need brains," said Lin Na, a
law graduate in charge of a new statistical survey of the economy in Yanqing,
the main town of Yanqing county, which is located about 80 kilometers
northwest of central Beijing.
About 10% of the 2,000 university graduates serving as counselors in the
surroundings counties of Beijing work in the town of Yanqing, as part of the cun
guan project, which began in 1996. Cun guan (village official)
is the description in Mandarin for their task as local assistants. There will
be 100,000 cun guan job offers available until 2010, according to the
central government. Beijing expects to increase the number of cun guan vacancies
in the poor regions of Western China and offer them to recent graduates who
can't find an employment as a consequence of the global crisis. The monthly
salary of a Beijing cun guan ranges from 2,000 yuan to 3,000 yuan
(US$293-$440) per month.
After a three-year service period, cun guan are rewarded with a
permanent civil service job. This privilege is the main reason that many
graduates apply for a the post - most of the students working as rural
counselors couldn't obtain the marks required to immediately get a public
servant post.
Another great incentive for graduates, particularly those from peasant
families, is that they are granted hukou or a permanent residence permit
for the city where they have studied. This means they can go back to work there
after serving the three years in the countryside. In the past, a person could
live and work only in the place assigned by his residence permit. Today, people
can live and work in a city without hukou (such as rural migrant
workers), however they have no access to the benefits enjoyed by hukou holders
such as government subsidies on housing, medical care and education for their
children.
Wang said that students also become cun guan because they follow the CCP
teaching "of being the first to volunteer for the people". And he adds, "Mao
Zedong said that there are many things to do in the rural areas. This is still
true nowadays."
After decades of silence, scholars are looking back to the Cultural Revolution.
In China there is a new interest for that period of history, but this trend is
mainly focused on its positive aspects. Zhang Yinde, teacher of comparative
literature at the Paris III University, wrote in the book La pensee en Chine
aujourd'hui (published by Gallimard) a brief review of those opinions
that suggest that the Cultural Revolution "was an alternative to the hegemony
of the capitalist modernity that proposed solutions to the problems provoked by
today's capitalism in its international expansion".
The 45 cun guan based in Xianying represent almost the half of the total
staff working under the local administration. They say that their daily duties
are exhausting. They are divided in teams of two. In their assigned district
they are responsible to answer any doubts the farmers may have, to assist the
municipal arbitration office and to collect relevant statistics that can be
useful to analyze the economical and social development of the area. They are
usually responsible to teach the villagers how to use computers or to help them
filling out official forms. Depending on their academic background they will
assume specific missions.
Jia, one of the members of Wang's team, is an expert on disease prevention and
often inspects outpatient departments, checks the distribution of vaccines or
teaches first-aid procedures to nurses. Zhang is 25-years old and has a
graduate degree in economics. He focuses his skills on showing the farmers the
best way to maximize their benefits, "I remind them that they will earn more
money if they grow a certain kind of fruits depending on the situation of
prices in the market. I tell them that they will be more successful if they
joint their plantations or that there is the possibility to rent part of their
lands if they don't use them."
The rural experience could help this younger generation, who may become the
next leaders of China, understand concerns in the most populated regions of the
country. It is also an opportunity for them to have first-hand experience of
the freest elections in China: the elections of village councils and
commissions. The majority of mayors in the countryside are members of the CCP.
Most of the cun guan are also from the party, but there are cases like
the district assigned to Wang, where the mayor hasn't been a CCP member for the
past 12 years.
Cristian Segura is Beijing correspondent of the Spanish daily newspaper
AVUI.
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