China Tries to Lure Its Unemployed Youth to the Countryside

livemint.com:

ZHAOQING, China—During the Cultural Revolution, a teenage Xi Jinping was sent down to the countryside, where he spent years in the late 1960s and early ’70s toiling on farms and reading books in a cave. Half a century later, China’s leader wants more young people to follow his lead. With youth unemployment recently hitting record levels—and deepening concern in Beijing about the hollowing out of rural China—Xi is calling on students and college graduates to embrace hardship and consider giving up city life for the countryside.

Officials have rolled out a number of programs to lure young people to rural areas, where they are tasked with promoting the quality of local crops, painting walls and extolling the Communist Party’s leadership to farmers. The government hopes that deploying hundreds of thousands of young people to Chinese backwaters will give underemployed young people work while rejuvenating villages left behind by China’s economic rise. In reality, many young people are using the programs to postpone the potentially painful process of searching for jobs today in China’s big cities.

The work they are doing often falls short of fixing the underlying problems of rural China, which include a lack of business and investment. In a village west of the southern city of Guangzhou, a group of college volunteers recently painted an antidrug slogan on a wall. The village, which has been earmarked by the government for revival, was all but deserted, with businesses closed and some of its homes abandoned and overgrown with weeds.