College graduate's love for rural job fit for the world of celluloid

By Lan Tian (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-12-24 07:38

Having graduated from the alma mater of movie stars such as Zhang Ziyi, Huang Huang was considered good enough for a successful career in films.

But she wanted none of that. Instead, she preferred working in a rural area, a suburb in Beijing, to be precise.

Huang started looking for a job in July last year after learning all the tricks of the celluloid trade at the Central Academy of Drama for four years. She was 21 then and had majored in film and television production.

Huang was born in Nanning, capital of the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region. But today, she is an assistant village head of Xiaotang village in Changping district in northern Beijing.

And she is not the only college graduate working in Beijing's villages - there are about 8,100 others like her.

The government started encouraging graduates in 2005 to work in villages of 28 provinces and regions to improve and strengthen rural administration, as well as to create more jobs for graduates.

By the end of October, 78,000 college graduates had been appointed as village officials in those provinces and regions, almost four times the target of 20,000, Xinhua said yesterday.

Zhou Beiliang, who graduated in law from Tsinghua University in 2006, has written a letter to President Hu Jintao, explaining how his job in a village in western Beijing's Pinggu district had helped him as an official, as well as a human being. Zhou has said he helped farmers win several cases and 500,000 yuan ($72,670) in compensation.

"The central government has paid a lot of attention to college students-turned-village officials. I thought we should tell the president something from the villages," Xinhua quoted him as having said.

President Hu sent copies of Zhou's letter to related departments, instructing them to communicate frequently with such village officials, listen to their views and work out a long-term mechanism on this practice.

A deputy to Beijing municipal women's congress that ended on Monday, Huang said yesterday that she chose to work in a village because the Beijing municipal government offered good terms for graduates.

"A college graduate working in a village gets a yearly salary of 30,000 yuan and can get a Beijing hukou (residential certificate), too," she said.

To get closer to the villagers, Huang has put away her "beautiful clothes", dresses simply and tries her best to imitate the accent and fast talking style of Beijing residents.

At first, her job was confined to typing and some paperwork. But gradually, she realized a college-graduate village official's job was not only to fit into rural life, but also to bring about change in rural areas.

So she set up an electronic archive for the village on a computer, and opened a blog to let villagers know more about public affairs.

"Working in a village offers me more opportunity to use my talents. I'm not the best college-graduate village official in Changping, but I'm among the most hardworking," she said.

More than 6 million students are expected to graduate from colleges next year.