China staffing more villages with college grads

BEIJING - China has made plans to staff every other village with at least one college graduate by 2015, as it looks to optimize the talent pool for grass-roots management.

According to a number of guidelines issued recently by the Organization Department of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and several other ministries, China will install more college graduates into leading posts of villages, townships and counties in the next three to five years.

China began to send volunteer college graduates to work as village officials in the mid-1990s, a move to help develop the country's rural regions, which lag behind cities in the course of modernization.

In an increasingly competitive labor market, the rural jobs have offered college graduates a stable income and preferential policies to seek advanced learning or take other government jobs.

As of the end of 2011, more than 210,000 college graduates had served as grass-roots village officials, the People's Daily, the CPC's flagship newspaper, reported in May.

The newspaper said there would be 400,000 such officials in China by the end of 2015, and 600,000 by the end of 2020.