Major problem

A few provinces this year have started to arrange positions and jobs for graduates based on their actual majors and knowledge background, according to the website of graduate rural apprentice officials.

Most of the chosen villages in Shaanxi Province, where 2,000 graduates were enrolled to work last year, have little or no opportunity for graduates to employ their professional knowledge, admitted Chen Dan, a member of the Shaanxi Ministry of Organization program's team.

Shaanxi Province launched its "Graduate Rural Apprentice Officials" program three years after this program went nationwide in 2005. Aimed at enlarging graduate employment and developing the rural economy, graduates mostly sign up to a three-year contract.

"Graduates will experience all kinds of work at the village, but to better fit their skills, most of their work is office and copying work," Chen Dan told the Global Times. There will be 3,000 new apprentice officials joining up this year.

"Our present focus is to establish a practical system to fully exploit graduates' advantages and encourage them to develop their careers in villages," said Chen.

"We only offer a kind of macro help, such as giving guidance on loan applications and explaining and popularizing new policies," said Liu.

Idealistic

It was too idealistic to expect graduates to develop the rural economy, believed Wen Tiejun, a director of the School of Agricultural Economics and Rural Development at Renmin University of China in Beijing.

Graduates should switch their focus from rural economic development to propaganda and government document work.

"This work could help standardize village governance, which is helpful to rural stability," said Wen.

Liu, who took the job partly because he could get a hukou registration card to later reside in Beijing, now treasured his work as assistant to the Party secretary of a village in Tongzhou county, an eastern suburb of Beijing. He explained with pride how he had used the computer to input information about annual wheat insurance and so stepped up work efficiency.

Since 2006 when Beijing began to employ graduates in villages, more than 8,000 graduates including Liu have worked in nearly 4,000 villages in the suburbs of Beijing, the first place in China where each village has two graduate rural apprentice officials.

Liu said after his three years is up, he has four choices: take the entrance examination for postgraduates, take the civil service examination to become a formal government official, look for another job or launch his own businesses.

Liu wants to find another road after his contract expires, but he worries he might not find a proper job.

"In the village, we have little space to use and practice our professional knowledge learned at college," he said.

Lou's major – agriculture – made him more hopeful. Beijing allows 10 percent of graduate rural apprentice officials to extend their contract an extra year and 10 percent to take local government civil service exams.

Lou would happily choose either, but is pessimistic about the new minimum requirements introduced for many government jobs.

"This narrows my choices," he said. "Most positions require liberal arts."
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