GRADUATES RETREAT TO RURAL CHINA

Xiao Lisheng had big ambitions when he entered university four years ago. He expected a bright future in an export company in the booming coastal metropolis of Shanghai.

But now, as he prepares to graduate with a degree in international economics and trade, his future looks as if it may lie with the Communist party's educational league in the far-flung and impoverished north-west region of Ningxia.

Faced with the impact of a slowing global economy on its coastal export base and 6m university students set to graduate alongside Mr Xiao this June, China is once again sending young university graduates back to the countryside.

“We encourage graduates to serve in rural areas, taking posts such as village officials, teachers and volunteers in west China,” Yin Weimin, minister of human resources and social security, said last week as he outlined government plans to address unemployment among graduates.

The Communist party has a long tradition of sending young intellectuals into China's vast rural hinterland, often causing terrible suffering and disastrous economic consequences. But Chinese officials and analysts insist that, this time, things are different.

“In the 1950s and during the Cultural Revolution this happened with ideological motives,” says Cai Jiming, head of the Centre for Political Economy at Tsinghua University, who spent three years on a farm himself after graduating from high school in 1975. “If we can find a way to make this benefit both the graduates and the target regions, then it would make economic sense.”

The government has called the unemployment problem among graduates “grave” and made clear that it is almost as worried about the fate of university graduates as it is about the millions of migrant workers who have lost jobs in coastal factories.

For many provincial governments the graduates' woes are presenting an opportunity, and some have been sending delegations to big cities to recruit graduates who are failing to find work elsewhere. At such an event held by the Ningxia government last weekend, close to 1,000 students lined up to apply for more than 300 mostly low-paid jobs in a region many of them would not even have considered moving to a few years ago.

Such is the case with the post Mr Xiao is interviewing for. The Communist party's Educational League sends lecturers around the country to “refresh the enthusiasm for socialism and spread Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong thought,” says Gao Yadong, the Ningxia branch head. “A masters degree in philosophy and a patriotic mind” are the main qualifications for the job, which will pay about Rmb20,000 ($2,900, €2,270, £2,100) a year.

But Mr Xiao makes it quite clear that, as far as he is concerned, any job will do. “In past years, 80 per cent of students in their final year would have signed contracts by now, but this year it's only 20 per cent in our class,” he says.

“So the priority right now is to find something with a salary – I can always move on later.”