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It has been three years since Wang Caiyue quit her job as an English teacher and followed her dream of a better life in the countryside around Pingdingshan city, Henan province.
In 2006, the 33-year-old swept the vote to become Qiuzhuang’s first college-educated village chief after winning the hearts and minds of its 936 residents. A pioneer of the city’s ambitious plans to install graduate cadres in each of its 2,637 villages, she has since been hailed as a “true local” by the village’s Party chief Huang Fawa.
But three years into the job, she has realized she is facing a very different challenge from the one she originally envisioned.
Started in 2003, the initiative, dubbed the “cunguan (village cadre) movement”, has been compared by many to the “zhiqing (educated youths) movement” from the 1950s and 60s, during which Mao Zedong sent millions of urban youths to the countryside. It was launched in the hope it would help curb rising unemployment and stimulate the staggering rural economy.
Last year, the central government made a five-year plan to hire up to 200,000 college graduates to work in villages across China. With around 6.1 million expected to be out of work this year amid the global financial crisis, authorities of all levels are pinning their hopes on the project.
But every hope is accompanied by frustration, even in Qiuzhuang, where Wang has little power to disagree with 73-year-old Huang, a revolutionary-minded Party veteran who still holds a massive influence over a village he has led since 1970.
One of the last members of the original zhiqing movement, Huang told China Daily: “These college graduates working as rural cadres are, just like we were then, receiving reeducation by the poor and lower-middle peasants in response to Chairman Mao’s call. Their work is to unite the masses and develop the economy.”
Huang was among Dalizhuang township’s first 32 zhiqing during the rural cooperative movement in early 1955, when those with at least a primary education were convinced to return to their hometown rather than seek a job in the city.
It led to almost immediate economic success, with Chairman Mao declaring soon after: “All intellectuals who could work in the villages should do so happily. The countryside is a vast land. Great accomplishments can be made there.”
So began the first wave of zhiqing when 2.88 million elementary and middle school graduates returned to their native land. The second followed in 1968, when Dalizhuang was renamed Guangkuotiandi Dayouzuowei (Vast Land and Great Accomplishment) People’s Commune, with Chairman Mao this time calling for “educated youths to go to rural areas and be reeducated by the poor and low-middle peasants”.
Around 18 million urban youths flocked to the countryside from 1966 until the movement was halted in 1980. Dalizhuang hosted 830 zhiqing, including incumbent Vice-premier Li Keqiang’s wife Chen Hong who stayed in the commune for three years.
However, despite linking it with the current cunguan project, Huang said there were still significant differences. “Unlike in the past, rural areas today are in dire need of people with college education. Things just don’t click when people don’t have that much education,” he said. “Economic development is borne from talents who are borne from schools.”
But while village chief Wang is all too aware that development means so much more in today’s rural China, she admits that, in a market economy, it is no longer possible for rural educated youths to return to villages.
Qiuzhuang has 36 university graduates, including four who have either a PhD or Master’s degree, but not one has returned to work in the village after completing their studies.
Many local residents are employed at the six nearby factories, all set up by businessmen from outside the region. Wang has tried to help villagers start their own businesses — but that has proved much easier said than done.
“We’re sent here to lead the masses to wealth, not to receive reeducation,” argued Wang. “The cunguan movement seeks to strengthen social stability and boost rural economy. After they are promoted, those cadres with experience at the village level may be more inclined to draft farmer-friendly policies.”
But there are long-held doubts as to what role cunguan can play during their three-year terms.
The drive’s central missions are to resolve urban unemployment, find capable reserve cadres for the Party and change the static nature of rural China. But Wang’s main obstacles are not only inherent rural issues but also the local consensus that, unless she helps villagers get rich fast, her role would be constrained to a zhiqing — an assistant.
But still, she has few complaints. With an annual per capita income of 5,360 yuan ($780), Qiuzhuang’s economy is already more solid than most villages in Pingdingshan. And unlike Wang, some cunguan have also run into problems like local clan clashes.
Li Gang, deputy Party boss of Gaozhuang village in the city’s Zhanhe district, told China Daily “the blessing of local powers” has been his biggest lesson during five years in the job. “No work can really be done if you can’t develop good connections with the Party boss and village chief,” stressed Li, 33.
As in much of China’s countryside, clans are the de facto ruling force in local affairs, with Gaozhuang dominated by the Gao and Jia families, each trying to oust the other in rural elections through every means possible. The result is a paralyzed system of governance and a village in piling debt.
Li, an official with the district’s culture bureau who volunteered to become a cunguan with hopes of boosting his rise up the career ladder, has regressed to what he called his “old, laidback self” over the years.
“Any cunguan must first keep the local leaders together and do their best to coordinate relations between the Party and village committees. They must also be patient and constantly report to their superiors,” said Li, whose focus is now on leaving the village rather than advancing his career.
“It’s actually okay to work here … but all government staff who work as cunguan should be succeeded by non-government workers. That hasn’t been the case with me.”
Li’s worries are shared by many cunguan who already have stable government posts, or are teachers and doctors, with decent pay and are seeking personal gains out of their village experience.
The policies have been “unfair” for non-government workers who passed tests to become cunguan, admitted Chen Xunzhang, head of Pingdingshan’s cunguan office. Government officials are given a monthly subsidy of more than 2,000 yuan, while ex-company employees earn less than half that amount.
And while all the cunguan who finish their service receive bonus points in the national civil servant recruitment and national graduate school entrance exams, there are few preferential policies for those who do not intend to follow a career in politics.
“Most of these people aren’t enrolled in the government, were born and raised in the countryside and hold strong social convictions in rural development,” Chen told China Daily. “I wish we could do more for them as, generally speaking, urban cunguan tend to be spoiled.”
Chen’s office sent an inspection team to a village in Pingdingshan’s Ruzhou county this year to ask five random villagers about their cunguan, a government worker stationed there in 2007. None knew who he was, including a local market trader who claimed to know everybody in town.
But making it fair for all is no easy task, with the existing administrative framework making selfless devotion a must for non-government workers.
Many villages still lack basic facilities in their rural committee buildings, where the cunguan is required to live, and most make office renovation their first priority — Li, for instance, spent more than 40,000 yuan on a new bed, two sofas and gadgets for his small living room.
Only a dedicated few, mostly from the villages, have kept with the most basic living standards. Zhao Xinping, a tall, shy, spectacled man of 31, is most representative of them all.
A rural child, Zhao studied accounting and was working in downtown Pingdingshan for 500 yuan a month when he heard the city needed more cunguan in October 2003. Despite his boss offering to triple his pay if he stayed, he volunteered and passed several exams before finally settling in Yinwang village in July 2004.
“I grew up in a village, so it was only natural I come back to one,” he told China Daily.
In five years, the quiet man turned the village around. He single-handedly managed to build almost 5 km of cement roads, as well as helped various villagers start businesses or find jobs.
He sleeps on a broken wooden bed in a shabby, cold office where the cracking walls are covered with complimentary banners from local residents; he grows vegetables outside and cooks all his own meals, and his pro-poor attitude and puritanical work ethic have made him the villagers’ man.
Wang Ying, a 63-year-old farmer who rarely picked up his pen after graduating from junior middle school in 1965, was in such admiration he wrote a report of more than 100,000 words on Zhao’s contributions to the village.
“I intend to write a trilogy,” said Wang, who has spent the past year and a half on the report. “He’s too good a cunguan, a comrade, a leader. Zhao is a 21st century lighthouse for the world, leading us to the road ahead.”
Zhao said the cunguan experience has helped him realize his value and truly be with the masses. “I don’t want to leave,” he said. “As a rural man I feel especially fulfilled being able to do something for the countryside. I want to do more.
“My parents hosted zhiqing back in the day but I think we’re different. Our main task today is development, because development is the cardinal principle.”
But even cunguan like Zhao have not been able to stay oblivious to some of the deeper problems. He received the highest number of votes in the local election last year but he has not yet been sworn in as the village chief as, in Wang’s words, “some issues have not been resolved yet”.
