Chinese youth leave cities to taste country life

SHANGHAI, Aug 22 (Reuters) Three decades after Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution, tens of thousands of Chinese students are once again streaming out of cities to the countryside in an ideological journey to experience rural life.

''I did have a tough time persuading my parents to let me go, for they suffered at my age in the countryside,'' said Zhen Zhu, a student who graduated this summer and will move to the remote northwestern region of Ningxia in September.

Zhen is among about 150,000 university graduates who will leave wealthy eastern cities this year and head to China's poorer rural regions, including Tibet in the west and Yunnan in the far south, according to the official China Youth Daily.

The number of young people making the trip to the country is believed to be the highest since the Cultural Revolution, a turbulent social and political movement which lasted a decade until 1976.

A few years ago, relatively few students would have left the comfort and safety of the cities for China's countryside, which was seen as a dead-end route for their careers and aspirations.

But the journey has once again become popular among some Chinese youth who see themselves as modern-day pioneers.

The ''Serving the West Project'' run by the Chinese Communist Party's Youth League has recruited a total of 16,000 students for programmes in the countryside since it was set up in 1996.

Around 5,000 students have signed up so far this year.

Participants can apply for a monthly subsidy of 300 yuan (38 dollar) -- around one tenth of the average salary which new university graduates can expect in China's largest cities.

PRIMITIVE LIVING CONDITIONS Although the students will not face the near-famine conditions endured by their predecessors, living conditions in rural China are generally much more primitive than in cities.

''Students focusing on money will never choose to go to the west, as they can make much more in the big cities with their university degrees,'' said Xing Yue, recalling that he went for weeks without showers while teaching in Ningxia four years ago.

Many of their parents were sent as students to work in the west as part of the Party's radical ''learn from the masses'' campaign during the Cultural Revolution.

The campaign aimed to purify people's political views by putting them in contact with the peasantry, seen as guardians of Communist values.

Young people in that campaign endured hunger, harsh living conditions and backbreaking labour on collective farms and construction projects. Once in the countryside, they were often barred for years from returning to the cities. Some had to stay in the country for as long as a decade.

This time, the students aren't being forced to go. And their motives are more varied than those of their parents.

Some are looking for jobs in the small towns of China's hinterland. Despite a booming national economy, many new graduates are finding it hard to get work in the ultra-competitive job market of the eastern seaboard.

HIPPIES IN CHINA An emerging Bohemian strain among China's youth is another reason. For the first time, tens of thousands of young people have enough money to put off joining the rat race immediately and to travel in search of fresh experiences.

China's countryside provides an exciting new environment for them, recalling the road trips made by hippies in the western United States in the 1960s, or hitch-hiking journeys by European students after graduation.

But in a surprising throw-back to the Cultural Revolution, many Chinese graduates are showing some of the same idealism that initially inspired their parents several decades ago.

Qian Liqun, a Peking University professor who spent a decade of his youth in the southwestern province of Guizhou, said most students going to the countryside ''either regard themselves as saviours of the peasants, or by contrast, see themselves as needing to learn from the peasants''.

Many say they seek to help the undeveloped regions of China, which have lagged behind the country's economic success.

And in another echo of Cultural Revolution ideology, many students believe that working with tough, self-sufficient peasants will help them learn important values and skills.

''My parents agreed to let me go because the programme was only for one year, and they knew I would never imitate them by spending a decade working on a farm for the sake of an ideal.

They had no choice when they were young,'' Xing said.

''My parents and I aren't extremists like people were during the Cultural Revolution. But I wanted to have contact with the soil and to help people,'' he added.

REUTERS DKA DS1120